Meet the improved Collections tool: A better way to showcase your products

The savviest brands know that having a robust product selection is key to driving orders and boosting sales, but navigating pages and pages of SKUs can be off-putting for retailers. Faire’s Collections tool was created to help brands curate and streamline their catalog into logical and inspirational groupings, making the purchasing experience simpler and more delightful for their customers.

The Collections tool offers you more control in your merchandising: helping you design curated assortments around seasons, trends, bestsellers, and more. Collections can also help you serve up more relevant products and inspire purchasing ideas for specific types of customers, enabling you to tell and adapt your brand story for different retailers and drive demand across categories, product types, and customer interests.

Finally, by offering free merchandising displays to retailers who meet a minimum spend on your collection, you can increase average order volume, repeat orders, and provide free marketing.

What are Collections and how are brands using them?

Collections can be built around anything from new products or bestsellers to seasonally relevant products (summer, fall, etc.) to groups of products that are tailored for a specific audience (like moms or tweens). For inspiration, check out a few of our favorite examples: 

Colorado-based apparel brand Joyfolie guides retailers to purchase logical and inspirational product groupings like their “How We Style It” series, which helps pull together cohesive looks and complementary accessories.

Pennsylvania-based Pyknic is a quirky food and lifestyle brand that uses Collections to curate a group of themed gifts for coffee lovers like mugs, pins, and even such apparel as hats and tees. Pyknic also uses video to elevate its Collection and bring its brand story to life.

Dirty Cow, an eco-friendly chocolate brand based in London, uses Collections to help buyers find their best-selling bars.

What are the new features I should look for? 

The new features we’ve added to Collections can help you better merchandise your shop, which helps your customers navigate your line—making them more likely to place an order before getting overwhelmed or fatigued. These easy-to-navigate groupings create a great first impression with new retailers and can serve as a powerful marketing tool for your shop—brands that build Collections drive up to 4x more sales than those that don’t.

Our latest updates include:

• Bulk add products to your collection. No more manually adding each product one at a time to your collection. Now you can multi-select products and add them all to your collection easily.
• Collection-specific promotions. Quickly and easily promote a collection by offering a discount on an entire collection’s products (read more on this below).
• Add a free merchandising display option to your collection. This feature gives brands located in the US or Canada the option to offer retailers a free display when they reach a required order minimum (keep reading for more information).
• A cleaner and more intuitive user experience for you, including the ability to “select all” options within a product or SKU
• The ability to upload video to your collection to bring your products to life
• Marketing tools to promote your collection to customers, including time-saving email templates (find them in the Campaigns tab) and social media assets 
• The ability to add preorder products to your collections

How do I build a collection?

1. Go to Collections in your brand portal 
2. Start building a new collection by selecting a curated assortment of products from your catalog—you can select styles available to ship now, for preorder, or both
3. Add the story behind your collection to inspire retailers 
4. Include a feature image to represent your collection, and be sure to upload a video—brands that add videos to their collections see up to a 20% higher add-to-cart rate than those that don’t
5. Send an email campaign to promote your collection with the “Collection spotlight” template and post on your social media channels using these templates
6. Remember, you can refresh and rearrange your collection anytime in the Collections tab

How do promotions for collections work?

With our latest update, you can now create a promotion specifically for a collection. Instead of manually offering a promotion for each product in a collection, it’s now quick and easy to apply a discount to an entire collection to help you promote new products, seasonal products, clearance products, and more. Currently collections promotions can only be offered as a percent off. Product promotions cannot overlap with collections promotions.

To create a collection-specific promotion from the promotions tab:

1. Click create new promotion on the right-hand side of the promotions page
2. Fill in all details of the promotion
3. Hit “save promotion” and publish your promotion!

To create a collection-specific promotion from the collection:

1. Click Create promotion on the right-hand side beside the desired collection
2. This will send you to your promotions tab to create a new promotion

How do free merchandising displays work?

Many of our brands offer merchandising displays to retailers as a way to easily help them showcase the brand’s products in their stores. Merchandising displays are also a great way to provide free marketing for your brand. Now, we’ve added the ability for brands in the US and Canada to offer retailers a free merchandising display with a collection when a required order minimum is reached. 

Add a display to a new collection:

1. In the Collection tab, select “Create Collection”
2. After filling out your collection details, select Include Free Display. Note that you can only add a display to one collection at a time.
3. Fill in the display details, including the display type, description, value of the display, qualifying value (the minimum a retailer must meet in order to add the free display to their order), materials, and dimensions.
4. Add an image of the display
5. Select Publish Collection 

Add a display to an existing collection:

1. Head to the Collections tab and select the collection you’d like to add a display to
2. Select Include Free Display
3. Fill in the display details
4. Add an image of the display
5. Select Publish Collection 

Any best practices I should be aware of?

• Do keep your collection curated; don’t include too many styles
• Do build a collection whenever you launch a new line
• Do build “starter pack” and bestseller collections to introduce your shop to customers
• Don’t forget to add videos to your collection to bring your brand and products to life
• Don’t let your collections get out of date (OOS inventory, past seasons, etc.)

How are you using the Collections tool? Are there things we could be doing to improve it? Have any pointers that could help newer brands? Our Brand Community Facebook group is a great place to give feedback and make sure your voice is heard. We love hearing from brands so we can continue to improve Faire’s tools together.