Selling wholesale can feel like a black box, especially if you’re used to DTC. For many retail teams, it’s unpredictable, data-poor, and heavily relationship-driven. But for most modern brands, wholesale is still a core part of the business model.
This guide breaks down how wholesale works, how to plan it, and how to make it more efficient. Whether you’re starting a wholesale business or managing dozens of retail accounts, understanding these fundamentals helps you make better decisions around inventory, pricing, and supply chain planning.
What Is Wholesale in Retail?
Wholesale means selling your products in large quantities to another business, like a department store, boutique, or online marketplace. Those retailers then sell your product to the end customer at full retail price.
In a wholesale model:
- You sell at wholesale prices (usually 50% of retail).
- Your wholesale partners take on selling the product to the consumer.
- You negotiate payment terms, delivery windows, and product assortment.
Most brands operate both DTC and wholesale channels. For example:
- DTC: Your own eCommerce site or brick and mortar store (~70% of business).
- Wholesale: Retail stores like Saks, Net-a-Porter, or specialty boutiques (~30%).
Wholesale orders come in bulk, sometimes six figures per PO, and often drive critical revenue during seasonal market weeks.
Why Brands Sell Their Products Through Wholesale
Selling wholesale helps you scale faster. It puts your great product in more locations, in front of more customers, with lower marketing spend. Even brands with strong DTC sales often rely on wholesale to expand reach and stabilize cash flow.
Key benefits:
- Reach new segments of your target market by tapping into established retail stores
- Get volume orders that improve price and profit margin
- Gain credibility through association with trusted retailers
- Improve inventory turnover and optimize storage space
While DTC gives you more control and data, wholesale provides access, visibility, and bulk demand.
Types of Wholesale Accounts and How They Operate
Planning for wholesale depends on who you’re selling to. There are three main types of wholesale accounts:
Department Stores (e.g. Saks, Bloomingdale’s)
- High-volume accounts with national exposure
- Require EDI for wholesale purchase orders and replenishments
- May share limited sell-through data, often inconsistently
- Expect you to have warehouse space or inventory on hand for quick turnaround
Specialty Retailers (e.g. Net-a-Porter, SSENSE)
- Curated, category-specific buyers with niche audiences
- Purchase smaller volumes but are more agile
- Often reorder wholesale products based on performance
- May take risks on new brands if your market research is strong
Independent Boutiques
- Local shops, jewelers, or regional chains
- Buy conservatively based on cash flow and available storage space
- Highly relationship-driven, trust matters more than terms
- Great for building grassroots brand awareness
Understanding who your wholesale suppliers are, and how they purchase, is key to aligning your inventory and pricing strategy.
Wholesale Inventory Strategy: Made-to-Order vs. Made-to-Stock
A big part of selling wholesale is deciding when to produce. This affects your supply chain, warehouse space, and how you manage cash flow.
Made-to-Order (MTO)
- You wait to manufacture until a retailer confirms a PO
- Reduces risk of unsold wholesale products
- Slower to fulfill, tough for accounts needing immediate delivery
Made-to-Stock (MTS)
- You forecast demand and produce inventory in advance
- Faster fulfillment for big accounts with frequent reorders
- Higher risk, wrong forecasts tie up capital and storage space
Most brands use a mix. MTO for seasonal or uncertain items, MTS for core bestsellers. Your ability to pre-produce often depends on your relationship with the account and their willingness to buy in early.
Why Wholesale Planning Is So Hard
Wholesale planning is full of unknowns. Unlike DTC, you’re a step removed from the customer, and from the data.
Sparse and Inconsistent Data
You know what you sell in, but retailers don’t always share what they sell through. And if they do, it’s often in spreadsheets that don’t match your format. This makes forecasting, and measuring success, really difficult.
Volatile Demand
Even with good market research, retailer behavior changes quickly. Budgets shift. A buyer leaves. A product sells out unexpectedly. You might plan for 1,000 units and get an order for 300, or 3,000.
Relationship-Driven Sales
Wholesale buying depends on human relationships. It’s about trust, negotiation, and knowing the buyer’s tendencies. Forecasting without strong communication and insight becomes guesswork.
How Brands Plan Wholesale Today
Most teams still manage wholesale with spreadsheets. Even brands working with large retailers often track their wholesale business manually.
Common tools:
- Booking trackers by account
- Excel files with sell-in and reorder data
- Forecasts based on last season’s numbers, adjusted slightly
- Email chains for reconciliation across sales, planning, and finance
If you’re managing 10+ accounts with different systems, formats, and timelines, planning becomes a full-time job before you even get to strategy.
How Planning Platforms Like Toolio Help with Wholesale
Modern retail planning tools, including Toolio, are designed to help teams manage wholesale complexity more efficiently.
Here’s what they do well:
- Provide real-time visibility into available inventory to support faster decision-making
- Combine sell-in, sell-through, and inventory data in one place
- Track POs, delivery windows, and reorder trends at the account level
- Support “what-if” scenarios to simulate how accounts will behave
- Surface insights like which wholesale partners consistently over- or underperform
- Align DTC and wholesale plans to avoid conflict or overproduction
When you’re selling wholesale at scale, even small efficiencies, like automating bookings or visualizing account trends, help you recover margin and avoid costly missteps.
What Retail Planning Tools Can’t Do (Yet)
No tool can fully replace human judgment. Things like buyer relationships, market trends, or unexpected shifts in your target market often live in your team’s heads, not your system.
Also, many wholesale suppliers and retail stores use their own formats, portals, or timelines. Integrating those into a central tool still takes manual effort.
Tools make planning faster and clearer. But they still rely on experienced planners to make the calls.
Smarter Wholesale Planning Starts with Better Fundamentals
Wholesale isn’t going away. It’s still one of the fastest ways to grow a brand and move large quantities of product. But selling wholesale adds complexity that DTC teams often overlook.
To get better at it:
- Know your account mix and which ones affect your margin most
- Align on your inventory strategy and how much warehouse space you can realistically manage
- Use tools to reduce manual work and improve visibility
- Strengthen relationships with retailers, because trust still drives sales
- Plan collaboratively across sales, supply chain, finance, and planning
Even when data is imperfect, a resilient plan helps you act faster and smarter. That’s how brands thrive in wholesale, by blending structure with flexibility, and strategy with instinct.
From managing bulk orders to aligning supply chain and account-level forecasts, Toolio makes it easier to sell wholesale. Speak to an expert to see how Toolio can support your team.
