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In a world where retailers big and small struggle to compete with Amazon, a startup that is working to help local players stay in the game just raised $100 million.

San Francisco-based , which operates an online wholesale marketplace for local retailers, raised the money across two funding rounds led by and Continuity Fund. New investors included Peter Thiel鈥檚 and partners of Hong Kong-based . Existing investors , , and also participated in the rounds.

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The and financings ($40 million and $60 million, respectively) set a post-money valuation of $535 million for Faire (formerly called Indigo Fair) and brings its total raised to . Not bad for a company that just 21 months ago to try and help local retailers and makers 鈥渂reak free from the inefficiencies of an antiquated wholesale model.鈥�

In doing so, Faire borrowed something from online retailers鈥� playbook when building out its model: the concept of free returns.

鈥淲hile you and your friends have been sending back shoes, mattresses and anything else that didn鈥檛 meet your expectations the past decade, retailers have never been given this luxury,鈥� wrote Faire co-founder Max Rhodes in a March 2017 .

Giving local shops a way to try new products in their stores with the option of returning them within 60 days if shoppers don鈥檛 bite has proven quite successful so far, according to the company.

In a December 13 , Rhodes wrote that 15,000 stores are actively buying on the Faire platform and that 2,000 makers are fulfilling orders. The startup has also reached $100 million in run rate sales.

But the road to get to this point wasn鈥檛 without his bumps. In his blog, Rhodes relates how in January 2018, 鈥渁 shocking percentage of the products we鈥檇 sold got returned, and an even more shocking number of retailers never even paid us.鈥�

鈥淲e were losing serious money on every order we received, and the growth wasn鈥檛 slowing down,鈥� he wrote.

So, Faire then did what any startup that is focused on growth does. It pivoted. The company tweaked some of the rules of the marketplace, imposed credit limits on retailers, re-ranked makers and products, and made it easier for retailers to pay their invoices.

Within six months, return rates were down by 75 percent and defaults decreased by almost 90 percent, according to Rhodes.

It should be noted that Faire also has bootstrapped a prediction algorithm that it says will get smarter as its feed its own sell-through data into it. The former executives (Rhodes, for example, was the first product manager for several key initiatives at Square, including Square Capital and Square Cash, per his 附近上门 bio) said they learned from their time there 鈥渢he power of combining technology with well-trained human intuition.鈥�

While the future of retail is constantly evolving, it鈥檚 clear that not all consumers are focused solely on convenience. So it makes sense that retailers offering unique products with more personal customer service still have their competitive advantages, which companies like Faire only want to help increase.