An apparel wholesale marketplace where brands keep control

What an apparel wholesale marketplace should do for a brand

The appeal of any wholesale marketplace is simple: buyers you did not have to find. Trade show booths cost thousands per season, and cold outreach to retail buyers is slow even when it works. A marketplace puts your collection in front of retailers who are already sourcing — which is exactly the part of wholesale most apparel brands struggle to scale.

But apparel wholesale has rules of its own. Wholesale prices are meant to stay private, orders carry MOQs and size runs, and most brands curate their stockists rather than sell to anyone with a credit card. A generic marketplace listing is not the same as a working wholesale channel. What brands actually need is discovery layered on top of real wholesale software: a shoppable digital linesheet, retailer approvals, private pricing, and order management underneath.

That is the model LINESHEET is built on. The marketplace is one surface of a full wholesale platform — so when a retailer finds you, everything that happens next (access requests, pricing, messaging, orders, invoices) already lives in the same system.

Discovery without giving up the relationship

Here is how it works on LINESHEET. Your brand is visible in a public marketplace where verified retail buyers browse by category and request access. You review each request and decide who gets in. Only approved retailers see your wholesale prices, and only they can place orders. From the first message onward, the conversation happens directly between you and the buyer — the retailer becomes your relationship, not an anonymous order number.

To be clear, big marketplaces are good at what they are built for. Faire, for example, brings real marketplace demand and is strong in gifts, home, and general categories, though it is a marketplace rather than brand-owned software and typically charges commissions on orders per its published rates. The structural trade-off is that on most large marketplaces your brand lives inside the platform's branded experience, and the buyer relationship often runs through the marketplace rather than through you. For many brands that trade is worth making — the point is to know you are making it. See the LINESHEET vs Faire breakdown or the broader platform comparison for the details.

LINESHEET takes the opposite position: the marketplace exists to start relationships, not to own them. Your linesheet stays yours, your pricing logic stays yours, and every buyer who comes through the marketplace is a buyer you can message, invoice, and reorder with directly.

What brands get inside the LINESHEET marketplace

Because the marketplace sits on top of a full wholesale platform, a listing is not a dead-end profile page. Retailers who find you land on a real, shoppable catalog — and everything they do from there runs through tools you control. If you want to see how the catalog side works before listing, you can build a free linesheet without an account.

Built to work alongside your direct linesheet links

The marketplace is one door into your brand; your direct links are the other. Most apparel brands already have wholesale leads coming from somewhere — trade shows, Instagram DMs, referrals from existing stockists. On LINESHEET you serve those buyers by sharing your linesheet link directly, and the marketplace runs in parallel to surface retailers you have not met. Both channels use the same catalog, the same order management, and the same pricing rules, so nothing forks.

The pricing model follows the same logic. LINESHEET starts free, paid plans are flat per brand rather than per seat, and there is no annual contract. Direct orders on Pro carry a 0% platform fee, while marketplace-sourced orders — the ones LINESHEET brought you — carry a 15% fee. Details are on the pricing page, and if your products already live in Shopify, the Shopify import means your marketplace catalog stays consistent with your store without re-entry.