Faire: Verified View

Faire expanded its wholesale marketplace to include apparel brands and retailers, which was a key revenue segment. However, apparel brands hesitated to list their inventory due to concerns about style theft and knockoffs. At the same time, retailers refused to sign up without previewing available products first. This created a severe marketplace friction point that capped conversion. As the UX design and research lead, I navigated this tension by designing a flexible visibility framework. The solution protected brand intellectual property while providing legitimate retailers enough transparency to make purchasing decisions, directly driving platform growth.

Role: UX Lead (Research, Interaction Design, System Strategy

Output: Successful launch to faire.com

Duration: 1.5 Weeks (Rapid MVP Cycle)

Impact: Met the acquisition target of 531 high-quality apparel brands by the end of Q3

Business Strategy vs. Supplier Friction

Faire’s primary goal for the quarter was to acquire 500 premium apparel brands. The business strategy relied on keeping the catalog openly browsable to entice new retailers to sign up and buy. However, our marketplace analytics and support tickets indicated that this open-browsing policy was directly causing apparel makers to flee the platform. With the apparel item browsing set up the way it was, brands were faced with two massive systemic risks if they continued on Faire’s platform: unverified competitors stealing their proprietary designs, and bad actors undercutting their wholesale pricing.

Goats of the business, brand, and makers

States and Pathways

In addition to these pathways, we also identified the states a user could occupy when viewing inventory on Faire:Faire's strategy of attracting buyers by allowing unverified users to view inventory conflicted directly with the makers' safety. To find where the system was leaking data, I audited the platform to map every possible entry point. I isolated five key navigation pathways that led unverified users to a product detail page, ranging from primary navigation to special collections.

From there, I cross-referenced those pathways against the four technical user states:

  • Logged in, verified

  • Not logged in, verified

  • Logged in, unverified

  • Not logged in, unverified

Bypassing Wireframes

We began with an overwhelming number of sketches to map out potential solutions quickly. Because of the urgent timeline and an aggressive engineering schedule, we opted to bypass low-fidelity wireframes completely. I usually hesitate to skip that step, but the speed of the project required moving directly from raw sketches to high-fidelity designs to keep the development team unblocked.

the Gated Marketplace Experience

We focused on handling locked items within the search and category browsing views. We decided that showing obscured or locked items alongside public items would satisfy a retailer's desire to evaluate the platform's variety without exposing sensitive brand details.

The real challenge emerged on the brand landing page. If a retailer hit a solid wall of locked content, they would almost certainly leave the platform out of frustration. If we showed too much, the makers would lose trust. I iterated on multiple visual treatments to find a compromise that signaled value to legitimate buyers while locking down sensitive preorder catalogs.

Gut check with Brands

After analyzing the trade-offs, we built a high-fidelity prototype that hid sensitive preorder items from unverified or logged-out users, while leaving standard stock visible. I took this prototype into evaluative user interviews with active makers to stress-test our assumptions and see if this level of privacy actually made them feel secure.

Pivot: Putting Control in the Hands of the Maker

The feedback from makers was mixed but incredibly revealing. While shielding preorders was a step in the right direction, many makers pointed out that their inventory strategy changed constantly. Instead of a single, rigid rule decide by Faire, they wanted ultimate control of when and where items were seen.

This insight forced us to completely re-examine our approach. Rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all visibility rule, we shifted the system architecture toward a user-controlled model. We kept items visible by default to satisfy the business requirements, but designed an intuitive settings dashboard that allowed makers to adjust their own privacy levels. I was uneasy making everything visible by default as it heavily favored the business over the supplier. To balance this, I advocated for prominent onboarding instructions that explicitly called out this default policy and showed makers exactly how to change it.

Final Designs | Flow: User Not Logged In, But a Verified Retailer

Final Designs | Flow: User Logged In, But Not a Verified Retailer

The Impact

The final design system successfully deployed tailored onboarding flows for both logged-in and logged-out retail states. By giving makers clear levers to control their exposure, we unlocked the supplier bottleneck and safely scaled the marketplace.

  • 531 High-Quality Apparel Brands Formally Acquired by Q3

  • 100% Target Achievement for the Apparel Expansion Initiative