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When the pandemic shut down every festival, fair, and Comic Con in America, Wild Bill’s Craft Beverage Co. found its core business model on hold with no clear timeline for return. After 20 years of serving craft sodas from vintage-style wagons and booking 400 events annually, it plummeted to zero events in 2020. The wagons that had traveled to every corner of America suddenly had nowhere to go.
“It all came to a grinding halt. It was a pretty bad time for Wild Bill’s,” says Michael, who directs the company’s sales and marketing strategy for the veteran-owned brand. Since 2002, the company had built its reputation one festival at a time, through millions of customers who associated the brand with summer days and celebration.
Now, the brand faced an existential crisis. For a company built entirely on being where people celebrate, what happens when the celebration ends?
The team needed to pivot to canned sodas and retail distribution quickly.
They could have called any distributor in the beverage industry. Instead, they accepted an invitation to join Faire. Three years later, that decision has generated over 2,100 retail partnerships and average sales of more than $600K a year. Today, Faire brings in as much revenue as the company’s biggest traditional wholesale partners.
For a brand with zero retail presence three years ago, its path reveals something important about where the future of wholesale is heading.
Using every tool in the Faire toolbox
Wild Bill’s success comes from a simple strategy: Use every single tool Faire offers to its fullest potential.
“I use and abuse everything in Faire,” Michael says. In other words, Wild Bill’s doesn’t dabble, it deploys.
But what does “everything” actually mean? Start with Promoted Listings: Michael sets his budget to the max his budget allows and lets it run, which has allowed Wild Bill’s to lower its cost per acquisition rate. The team also participates in every Faire Market, running tiered promotions of up to 30% off that drive massive spikes—nearly $100K in their best month. They use the CRM on Faire to run campaigns, tagging and segmenting customers for better targeting. Everything gets tracked, optimized, scaled.
This aggressive approach started on day one when Wild Bill’s brought hundreds of its retailers onto the platform. And today, 40% of its volume flows through Faire Direct.
“We proportionately have a lot more Faire Direct customers than most brands,” Michael says. “For us, it was a way to make our products available to retailers online.”
The result: $30,000 a month became $50,000 a month. Next target: $70,000.
“Growth really comes from having consistent campaigns and just interacting in the DMs,” he says.
Faire Direct sets a new standard for speed
The real-time nature of Faire has created moments that traditional wholesale could never match. At the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo, or C2E2 for short, a comic book store owner approached their booth, interested in stocking Wild Bill’s. Traditionally, that would mean exchanging cards, sending applications, negotiating terms, and then waiting weeks.
Instead, Michael handed him a business card with a QR code for Faire Direct. “He literally sat there, he signed up, and he ordered it,” Michael remembers. “The Comic Con ended on Sunday. The product arrived on Tuesday or Wednesday.”
For a small team managing explosive growth, this velocity matters. “If we had to set up 2,000-plus customers on our backend and give them each credit terms and set up shipping addresses, it wouldn’t be feasible.”
Now, when retailers ask how to buy directly from Wild Bill’s, without going through distributors, the answer is simple: “Use Faire. There’s no other way to get six cases at wholesale prices.”
The Faire Direct widget on their website converts interest into orders without friction or overhead.
Understanding the data like never before
But perhaps the most important aspect of their Faire strategy is the data. For the first time, they’re able to access granular, actionable stats about their retail partners. “Being able to go into your customer list on Faire, segment by state, genre of retailer, or having the data to say I have 60 stores in these zip codes in Ohio. It’s pretty amazing.”
This is ammunition for growth. When Michael pitches to national retail chains or courts investors, he comes armed with proof: market penetration maps, retailer density by region, category performance data. “You can really craft a great data story with the customer data you can get on the retailers from Faire.”
They know which retailers price sodas at $5 versus $3. Which regions prefer which flavors. Which stores align with their veteran-focused mission. Traditional wholesale can bury this intelligence under layers of intermediaries.
“In the traditional retail world, there’s so many middlemen and gatekeepers, and having a relationship with the buyer is a coveted thing,” Michael says. “You’re able to talk to hundreds or, in our case, thousands of store owners on Faire. There’s no better way. If something’s working, you can easily ask the customer and figure out why it’s working.”
That direct connection drives decisions. When something works, they double down.
Faire’s value is in the numbers
After three years on the platform, Wild Bill’s discovered the hidden costs of traditional wholesale that don’t show up in initial calculations. The hours spent chasing payments. The negotiations and credit checks that slow down new relationships. The trade promotion dollars that evaporate without a clear ROI.
“People may focus on commission, but in retail, you’re paying for promotions like trade spend, you’re paying a broker, you’re paying the freight.”
What sealed it for them was watching how quickly they could activate new retailers. For once, they weren’t dealing with onboarding cycles. Just immediate orders flowing through the platform. Plus, free shipping through Faire pulls in retailers who might never try a new craft soda brand otherwise. Once they order, the reorder rates tell the real story—customers stick around when the experience is frictionless.
For Wild Bill’s, they recognized that going it alone cost more than any commission.
What started as survival is now strategy
Wild Bill’s wagons are back on the circuit. Hundreds of events a year, just like before. But the company that emerged from 2020’s shutdown looks different than the one that entered it. The platform it joined as a pandemic pivot became a permanent advantage.
“It’s crazy how fast you can do it,” Michael says about the entire Faire ecosystem.
The team has added 2,100 retail partners through the platform. They’ve built data capabilities from the CRM that impress major retailers. And most of all, they’ve proven that brands can embrace new platforms without abandoning what works.
