Many of the traditional wholesale sales and marketing methods no longer deliver viable results: 

1. Trade Shows have been in decline for many years. For the first two years of Covid all trade shows were closed. By the end of 2021, two years into the Covid pandemic, any wholesale buyer who could not work online had left the industry.
2. During the same time, most traditional wholesale agents stopped working for the same reasons and because their costs were too high.
3. The first attempt at making online ordering happen at scale was through B2B e-marketplaces, such as Faire and Ankorstore, which used to offer new stores €300 - €350 free to spend on their first purchases. This bubble has long since burst, and in the famous case of Faire, after raising $416 million in a series G investment round in 2022, the company has struggled to keep its proposition relevant with declining sales revenue and a large part of its workforce being made redundant.
4. With a wholesale industry that could not have physical meetings, and with online marketplaces only yielding small orders with very little repeat business, most participants experimented online for B2B sales. It is probably no coincidence that in 2021, tracking changes brought about by changes in Apple’s iOS 14.5, dramatically increased the cost of pay-per-click advertising, making it almost impossible to achieve an viable ROI out of any of the paid online channels, including Instagram, Facebook or Google.