About Us

Who we are, why we’re here

Building your own business is incredibly satisfying.

But it’s a lot of work.

When it’s good, it’s great. Better than just about anything.

But when it’s bad, it’s real bad. It’s hard, it’s expensive, it’s scary.

If your business buys or sells wholesale, you have a whole other set of problems to solve before you can even make that first dollar. Inventory, cash flow, logistics – every item on every shelf has its own complex, interwoven dance from manufacture to final sale, and your business can thrive or die based on how well you keep up.

Our mission is to make wholesale easy and affordable for everyone.

We’re not here to help a handful of megacorps take over the world – we’re here to help everybody else stay competitive.

We believe creativity flourishes when tools are accessible, and our software was built to level the playing field.

We believe in solutions that are priced for small business, but powerful enough for the Fortune 500.

We believe that you – not your technology vendors – are the ultimate owner of your data, your relationships, and your brand.

We believe that the world is a better place when independent businesses thrive.

Being the change

As a company, we strive to provide a happy, safe workplace, living wage jobs and growth opportunities for our team.

An independent business ourselves, we’re not always hiring, but if you’d like to be a part of Candid our career page is here and we’re always interested in collaborating with likeminded folks.

Visit our Career Page

Our story

Candid Wholesale is a software startup based in Portland, Oregon, and we’ve built a platform that helps any brand or retailer build, grow and run their wholesale business online.

Over the course of a decade, founder Avery Bloom built an apparel brand with his wife Leah, designing and manufacturing apparel for women and kids in the heart of Portland. As the business grew, they hit a wall for both the brand and the store – wholesale was taking up more and more of everyone’s time, with vastly smaller margins and less consistent results than direct to consumer sales.

While the ecom business thrived, with strong off-the-rack technology to support it, wholesale was left cobbling together a dozen pieces of software just to keep everything straight. If something didn’t change, fast, wholesale was on track to sink the entire company.

The more people they talked to, the more they realized they weren’t alone. Sure, there were online marketplaces to take the whole thing off your hands, provided you wanted to treat wholesale like a low-margin closeout channel. And a handful of purpose-built, sector-specific tools that cost thousands of dollars per quarter to license. But there wasn’t anything in between.

We built Candid to fix this.

Wholesale has been largely ignored in the software space, with 80% of wholesale transactions still happening on paper, email, and over the phone. While often overlooked, the scale of wholesale is incredible – trillions of dollars a year annually in the US alone.

As ecommerce growth explodes, buyers and sellers increasingly expect their wholesale infrastructure to keep pace with the tools available to them in other areas of their business.

Candid was built to help both sides of the market, a platform to help companies ranging from fledgling boutiques to generational brands get ahead of these changes and move wholesale online. We don’t do that by getting in the middle and extracting high fees like marketplace models — we do it by helping independent businesses work directly with one another over the long-term.

It’s a simple, honest platform that’s built to grow with you, and designed around the way you already transact, track, and communicate.

We're still learning.

The best parts of Candid have always come from conversations with the people actually using it – if there’s anything we can do, or do better, please let us know! We’re here and listening.

Drop us a line