Stockist Topography
The Faire Marketplace Industrial Complex
There’s this type of boutique1 that has an “apothecary” option on their ecommerce dropdown menu alongside apparel, goods for the home, jewelry, and whatnot. At all of these stores, the “apothecary” items––that is: serums, lotions, hair masks, lip exfoliants, tinctures for sleep trouble––come from the same dozen or so brands. The usual suspects: Everyday Oil, Noto Botanics, Zizia Botanicals2 (lip balm), Salt + Stone (natural deodorant), Bodha (perfume), Wonder Valley (olive oil-based bath products) J. Hannah (non-toxic nail polish), Saipua (soap), Living Libations (cleansing/moisturizing face oils). All of this stuff comes from a hipsterish wholesale vendor called Faire Marketplace, which sells all things ethically produced with squiggly, millennial-coded graphic design. I know this because I used to work at the type of boutique I’m describing.3
What I’m circling around here is that there’s a very specific type of store that exists, and if you go to the website for any of these brands and go to the stockists or retailers page you’ll basically just see a list of all the examples of this in the country––and abroad!
The contempt I have for this sort of branding is…complicated. I feel so strongly about it because I am not altogether immune to its charms. For instance, I love when Gwyneth Paltrow does it. I do believe that life is about “finding the balance between cigarettes and tofu.” (Tofu is estrogenic and cigarettes boost testosterone according to acolytes of Ray Peat…maybe they cancel out…maybe Gwyneth was onto something). I guess I just feel like these Goop-adjacent lifestyle brands are cheap imitations by people who have worse taste than Gwyneth Paltrow? I know I’m adjacent to the target audience for these products; fundamentally I am a middle class white woman who believes in such things as “natural beauty” and “low carbon footprint.”
The aesthetic inclination / brand identity I’m trying to pinpoint here isn’t merely relegated to “apothecary” items––I just think “apothecary” is funny, so ostentatious, it makes me think of Romeo and Juliet. There are clothing brands too, like Injiri and Black Crane, which I don’t especially like. And other brands like Cawley and Tigra Tigra, which I love! The two stores I’m thinking of that perfectly embody what I’m talking about are Vestige in Philly and Oroboro in New York.4 These brands also all use the same model, who I swear is the most booked and busy model nobody has ever heard of. She only has 2,000 odd Instagram followers but has literally cornered the market for Goop-chic boutique ecomm. Her name is Natalie Tischler and I think she’s the most beautiful woman in the world; she looks like a Roman coin. As if that wasn’t enough, she’s a writer and artist. Extremely enviable.
Anyway, the thing that got me started thinking about this type of shop is my move to a new, smaller city, which has been dominating my psychic arena lately. I’ve developed this scarcity mentality around the things I have access to in New York and have been considering buying products I won’t have easy access to in Missouri as if I can’t just order them online. Then it occurred to me that an interesting way to identify appealing shops and areas in any given city is to search the stockist page of a semi-niche brand you like for stores that carry them there. Let’s call it stockist topography. As it would happen, my search for the city where I’m moving yielded very limited results. But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe not every city needs a store that sells seabuckthorn serums, hinoki-scented candles, and soda in a can with a matte label branded as a phony negroni for the “sober-curious.”
“boutique” sounds like a store on a generic Main Street street that sells ugly “blouses,” stationary, plastic dessert plates with a vaguely damask motif, tchotchkes, live laugh love type things, but what I’m describing here is a one-off store that sells wares from various different companies.
These brands love to be “botanical.”
In my time working at said store, I sampled a few of these products. The J.Hannah formula is too watery. Zizia Viper Balm tastes bad. Everyday Oil is a good product but it smells like a very bad time in my life.
My favorite of this sort of place is Vagabond, also in Philly. The last time I was there they had beautiful antique French linen smocks, embroidered Ukrainian folk dresses, and beautiful baskets. Their selection of wellness products is tastefully limited and they never update their website.