Faire, marketplaces & platforms
Hubba was a North American B2B marketplace that connected independent brands with retail buyers, and it is no longer a route a brand can build a wholesale channel on. If you searched for it because someone recommended it years ago, the practical answer is to look at the marketplaces currently serving your category and, more importantly, to build a stockist list that does not live inside any single platform.
That second part is the reason this is worth more than a one-line answer. Brands that lost a channel when a platform wound down mostly lost it twice: once when the orders stopped, and again when they realised the shops that had been ordering were names inside an account they could no longer log into.
What the platform was trying to do
The pitch was the same one every B2B marketplace makes. Independent retailers spend a lot of effort finding new products, small brands spend a lot of effort finding shops, and a catalogue with a transaction attached should solve both at once. Discovery, ordering, payment, sometimes terms, in one place.
It is a genuinely good idea, which is why the category keeps producing new entrants. It is also a difficult business, because the marketplace has to fund retailer acquisition and credit risk for years before the order flow supports it.
The lesson for a brand is not that marketplaces are bad. It is that a marketplace is a landlord. You can have a very good few years in a rented shopfront and still need to know where your customers live.
Why wholesale marketplaces come and go
Three structural pressures, all of them ongoing.
Retailer acquisition is expensive and slow. A shop owner is not browsing for new suppliers daily. Getting them onto a platform, and back onto it each season, costs real money per active buyer.
The credit is heavy. Offering retailers terms while paying brands on dispatch means the platform funds the gap and eats the defaults. That requires either a lot of capital or a fee high enough that brands complain about it.
Brands leak. Every successful introduction creates a relationship that eventually wants to go direct. Platforms write contract clauses against it, but the gravity is permanent.
Put together, these mean the category consolidates. A few platforms get large enough to fund the flywheel, several get acquired, and the rest close or pivot into software. Planning as though your current platform is permanent is the mistake, not choosing the wrong one.
What a brand actually loses when a platform closes
Not the orders — those were going to end anyway. What hurts is everything attached to them.
The buyer contacts, if you never copied them out. The order history that tells you which shops reorder and which bought once. The product reviews and the ratings that made new retailers trust you. The integration that kept your stock levels accurate. And the habit: shops that ordered through the platform have no bookmark for you, no saved payment method, no reason to think of you when they are planning next season.
There is a softer loss too, and it is the one founders mention afterwards. A platform with ratings, order history and a category page you ranked well on was carrying your credibility. Start again somewhere new and you are a brand with no reviews, no sales history and no placement, competing against brands who have all three. That takes a season to rebuild even when the product is identical.
A brand with two hundred marketplace orders and no exported list is a brand with zero wholesale accounts the moment the platform stops. A brand with the same two hundred orders and a spreadsheet of shop names, buyer names, emails and what each bought has two hundred warm leads and a very good email to send.
How to keep your stockist list portable
Do this now, whatever platform you are on, and do it monthly.
Export every order into one file you control. Shop name, buyer name where you have it, email, city, what they bought, case count, date, and whether they reordered. Ten minutes a month.
Put something in the box that creates a direct line. A printed card with your wholesale email and a note about reordering is not a breach of any reasonable platform agreement — you are not soliciting the order, you are making yourself findable. Check your agreement, keep it plain, and do not undercut the platform's price.
Ask for the buyer's name early. Marketplace orders often arrive under a shop name and a generic address, and the person who chose your product is the one you want to email in eighteen months. A single line in your dispatch note — asking who to address future updates to — usually gets it.
Build the place those accounts will land before you need it. A wholesale area on your own site with logged-in pricing, minimums and case packs means that when a platform changes or closes, the email you send has somewhere to point. The setup for that on Shopify is covered in Shopify B2B, and the strategic case for running it alongside a marketplace is in wholesale marketplace vs own website.
How to judge whether a platform will still be there
You cannot know, but you can read the signals that matter to your planning.
Is there a coherent answer to how it makes money from you? A platform funded by commission on orders it generates has an obvious, durable model. A platform that charges nobody anything and is still expanding is spending someone else's money, and the terms you signed up on are the ones most likely to change.
Does its retailer marketing look recent and specific? A platform that is still buying retailer attention shows it: current campaigns, market-week presence, category pages that have been curated this season.
Are brands in your category actively listing, with stock and current photography? An abandoned-looking catalogue is a leading indicator.
None of this means avoid a young platform. It means size your dependence. One platform should be a discovery channel with a known cost, never the whole channel. That is the same conclusion reached from the other direction in Faire alternatives.
Where North American brands look instead
Realistically, three places at once.
A current marketplace with a retailer base that matches your category, chosen on who browses it rather than on the fee. The framework for that choice is in best wholesale marketplaces for brands.
Your own B2B store for anyone who already knows you, which is where reorders belong because they cost you nothing to win.
And direct outreach for the shops you actually want, which is slower per account and produces the only relationships nobody can take away. This is the part brands skip and then regret, usually about a year later.
If you are starting the third of those and do not know which shops to approach, paste your store or product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers and distributors stocking comparable products. Working backwards from products like yours is faster than working forwards from a category directory.
Questions brands ask about closed wholesale platforms
Can I get my old buyer contacts back? Usually not after an account is closed. If you are still able to log into any platform you use, export today rather than at the point you need it.
Is it worth joining a small or new marketplace? It can be, as one of two channels, if the retailers on it are the retailers you want. Just do not build your production plan on it.
Should I be on several platforms to spread the risk? Two, maintained properly, beats five maintained badly. Every extra listing is another set of stock levels and prices that can drift out of sync.
What is the one thing to do differently this time? Keep the list. Everything else about a wholesale channel can be rebuilt in a month; the relationships take years.