What's happening in the wholesale industry? The new buyer-brand relationship and the future of wholesale

With a growing market and clients seeking diversity and immediacy, wholesale has transformed into a relational process, capable of intertwining artisanal sensitivity, intuition, and creative vision with data and technology. Today, wholesale represents about 60% of a brand’s total sales and has grown fivefold since 2020. 

How is wholesale changing?

Data shows how the traditional B2B (business-to-business) model is currently in a state of metamorphosis. This situation accelerates a structural change in wholesale and luxury distribution, where flexibility and control over commercial flows become crucial to maintaining competitive advantages.

Based on recent dynamics, it can be said that wholesale has never been merely an operational function, but an extension of the brand’s identity and its relationship with the buyer. For this reason, having a strong and recognizable identity becomes essential: it is at the wholesale level that the first brand communication takes shape, where the foundations of a narrative capable of translating into concrete sales results are built.

A brand’s commercial identity must now find its place in the gap between tradition and innovation. It is about proposing a dynamic that is not binary but a perfect combination of the two, through the adoption of digital tools that respect the creative heritage while also fostering growth, proving that digital can enhance—and not erase—the art of relationship-based commerce.

Uniting these perspectives is the shared vision of Mandatory and NuORDER by Lightspeed: building a new wholesale community model. Mandatory’s independent, buyer-first trade show format lays the foundation for a more connected and conscious way of doing business. This collaboration not only celebrates a shared horizon but also shapes a network of relationships and exchanges capable of guiding the future of wholesale.

The importance of community

NuORDER’s insight regarding the ongoing change highlights the importance of building a community not only as a sales lever but also as a tool to strengthen the perception of a brand’s identity and its products in the market. In this sense, a new wholesale model must be rethought as a digital infrastructure that does not eliminate the human dimension but, on the contrary, reinforces it. NuORDER represents a promising example in the contemporary landscape, as it modernizes wholesale buying and selling with visual showrooms, ordering tools, and inventory management.

The shared—and necessary—values for brands and retailers are: greater clarity, shared visibility, and smoother collaboration in ongoing commercial relationships, as seen with Mandatory. With awareness of the market shift where wholesale functions as a hybrid system, in which technology and relationships do not oppose each other but mutually reinforce, NuORDER and Mandatory create an ecosystem based not only on transactions but on dialogue, shared knowledge, and stronger relationships.

It is within this collaborative space that the future of wholesale is taking shape. In this process, a platform like NuORDER identifies a space for discussion and relationship building, a field of possibilities capable of generating and nurturing its community. Fashion wholesale is neither disappearing nor being reduced to an exclusively technological dimension: rather, it is evolving into a versatile system governed by relationships, visual identity, and creativity.