The IDC community weighs in on vendor loyalty, purchasing consolidation, and the sourcing infrastructure designers wish actually existed.
You submit a trade application for a vendor you have been meaning to work with for two years. You wait three weeks for approval, then get a login that routes you to a website where half the pricing is request-only. You ask about lead times and get a range so wide it is essentially useless. You ask about customization costs and wait four days for an answer. By the time you have what you need, you have already sourced the piece somewhere else.
Interior Design Community recently put a pointed question to its members: if a group of brands genuinely delivered on transparency, pricing clarity, accurate lead times, and responsive customer service, would you shift 70 to 80 percent of your purchasing to them? Or would you keep spreading it around the way most designers do now?
The question touched something real. The responses ranged from a firm “yes, obviously” to a more cautious “not quite, and here is why.” What ran through all of it was a shared frustration with a sourcing system that routinely cost designers time they could not bill and margin they did not intend to give up.
What the Question Is Really About
The question is not asking designers to choose between quality and convenience. It is asking something more fundamental: would you reorganize your purchasing behavior around performance, if performance were actually delivered consistently?
Right now, most designers source across dozens of brands, showrooms, and reps. That spread is partly about the design range. But it is also, in large part, a defensive behavior. When you cannot count on any single vendor to be reliable every time, you keep options open. You diversify sourcing the same way you might diversify risk.
“Yes! Why does it seem so obvious, yet elusive and unattainable for many?”
@west_interiors_cle
The gap between what designers actually want from vendor relationships and what the industry consistently delivers is not a secret. It is one of the most talked-about friction points in professional practice. The real question is whether designers would act on it if the conditions changed.
The Operational Cost of Fragmented Sourcing
Before getting to the consolidation debate, it helps to name what fragmented sourcing actually costs.
Every new vendor relationship carries overhead: the trade application, the account setup, the rep introductions, the time spent learning a portal, the early orders where you are still figuring out lead times and quality. That overhead is not billed to clients. It comes out of designer time, which means it comes out of the margin.
Multiply that across twenty or thirty active vendor relationships, add in the time spent chasing order confirmations, resolving shipping discrepancies, and re-verifying pricing that changed since last quarter, and you have a meaningful operational drag that most designers never quantify. It shows up as unprofitable projects and overextended project managers, but the root cause often traces back to sourcing friction.
This is exactly the right question to ask. That reliable sourcing partners would change how designers buy is a premise most designers accept immediately. The details of what that actually looks like operationally are where the conversation gets more complex.
The Case for Consolidation
Designers who already work with a curated, reliable vendor core describe real business benefits. Fewer vendor relationships, managed well, mean faster decisions, more predictable project timelines, and a deeper understanding of each brand’s strengths and limitations.
“I have found that being loyal to a handful of really good friends that can supply what I need for all of my variety of clients and projects is much more powerful than sourcing from 100 different brands not as often so I think there is power in purchasing it just depends on how you organize it”
@thymeandplacedesign
The organizing piece is key. Consolidation without structure is just narrowing your options. Consolidation with a clear, category-based system (knowing exactly which vendors you turn to first for upholstery, case goods, lighting, and rugs) creates a sourcing stack that speeds up projects without compromising range.
The Operations and Project Management dimension of the business is often where the sourcing strategy gets underinvested. Designers who take the time to build a preferred vendor list by category typically describe faster initial sourcing rounds, fewer COM situations, and better vendor relationships overall. The brands you work with most frequently are also the ones most likely to go to bat for you when something goes wrong.
And something always goes wrong. The difference between a vendor who prioritizes your call and one who routes you to a general service queue is a lot of stress on a tight timeline.
Where the “Yes” Gets Complicated
Not everyone is ready to hand over 70 to 80 percent of their purchasing to any set of brands, even reliable ones. The hesitation tends to cluster around two concerns: variety and dependency.
On variety: design identity is one way designers differentiate themselves and serve clients with specific aesthetic goals. A sourcing stack built around performance might converge on a narrower range of products, which could limit the work’s range and creative identity over time.
“I think this sounds great in theory, but Id be concerned that the variety of selections would be diluted as the vendors would begin directing their lines to satisfy what perhaps might be an even smaller group of designers/customers. We’re already seeing lines almost immediately adapt to social media trends, colors(or lack thereof) It almost feels to me like in every aspect of our lives we’re trading away much in the name of ‘convenience’ and expedience.”
@patricklandrumdesign
This is a real tradeoff. A reliable vendor who consistently delivers may still pull its line toward whatever is selling broadly. Designers who built a practice around finding the unexpected piece are right to weigh what they might give up.
On dependency: concentrating purchasing on a small group of brands also concentrates risk. A vendor pricing change, a production delay, or a souring distributor relationship can ripple through multiple active projects at once if that vendor carries a large share of your purchasing.
“Not really. I like having relationships with my vendors and the positive things that result from that.”
@mdbmoddesigns
Vendor relationships are not just transactional. They generate sample access, early product previews, priority service, and goodwill that pays out over the years. Spreading purchasing across more vendors, even at some operational cost, maintains a wider network and more reciprocal relationships across the trade.
The One Thing Almost Everyone Agrees On
Across the full range of responses, one frustration recurred: the trade application process.
“It sounds a bit like a buying group, which has never really appealed to me. What I really want is to submit one trade application that works for hundreds of brands. Why can we not do this?”
@katerinabuscemi
This is not a niche complaint. The redundancy of submitting essentially the same credentials and resale certificate to dozens of individual brands, each with its own portal and approval timeline, is a genuine inefficiency that serves no one well. It slows designer onboarding, introduces inconsistencies in approval outcomes, and costs designers hours of time unrelated to actual design work.
Platforms that aggregate trade access are beginning to address this, but the fragmentation remains significant. Until the onboarding infrastructure changes, designers will continue spending real time on administrative sourcing overhead before they have sourced a single piece.
What to Do With This Right Now
Whether or not you are ready to consolidate purchasing around a smaller set of brands, there are practical steps that reduce sourcing friction without requiring a full strategy overhaul.
Build a vendor list by category and review it annually. Identify which brands you rely on most for each product type, and make those brands your first call. A spreadsheet organized by category (upholstery, lighting, case goods, rugs, plumbing, tile) means you start sourcing from a curated list rather than a blank search. This is not a commitment to any particular vendor. It is a starting point for understanding where your purchasing already concentrates and whether those vendors are actually serving you well.
Track how much time sourcing takes on each project. If you are billing flat fees and do not have data on sourcing time, you are flying blind on one of the largest variables in your project profitability. The connection between sourcing efficiency and realized gross profit is direct. Do You Actually Know What Your Interior Design Business Is Making? makes the case for why measuring the gap between planned and actual margin matters so much in day-to-day practice.
Evaluate your current vendor relationships against a simple set of criteria: accurate lead times, responsive customer service, clear pricing, and samples delivered when you need them. Brands that consistently fall short on these points are costing you something, even if you have not calculated what. Brands that consistently deliver are worth protecting and deepening.
Consider what “consolidation” actually means for your practice. The 70 to 80 percent figure is a framing device, not a mandate. For some designers, consolidating into a reliable core of 12 brands while keeping 10 more for special sourcing is the right ratio. For others, it is twenty brands and five. The number matters less than the intentionality behind it.
Platforms like Material Bank have changed what is possible on the sample and discovery side, offering trade-only access to a wide range of vendors through a single account with free overnight delivery. That kind of infrastructure addresses one part of the sourcing problem without requiring purchasing commitment. It is worth knowing what tools exist before assuming the current friction is fixed.
The current geopolitical and tariff environment is also reshaping sourcing calculations. How Tariffs and Geopolitical Uncertainty Are Reshaping Interior Design Businesses covers how designers are navigating pricing volatility and shifting supply chains, a context that matters when evaluating which vendor relationships are worth investing in for the long term.
The Bigger Picture
The question Interior Design Community posed is really about something larger than purchasing strategy. It is about what the trade sourcing ecosystem owes designers, and whether the current system is delivering on it.
The honest answer from the community is: not consistently. The system imposes real costs that designers absorb, and most of those costs do not appear as line items anywhere. They show up as late nights, a margin that disappeared somewhere between proposal and final invoice, and the low-grade frustration of chasing information that should have been available in the first place.
Less settled is whether the solution is consolidation, better tools, industry-wide onboarding reform, or some combination of all three. What is clear is that the designers who have built reliable vendor relationships describe it as one of the most practical investments they have made in their practice.
The To-The-Trade podcast has explored this vendor-relationship dimension in depth: the designer who knows their rep, trusts the brand, and has a track record with the vendor is in a fundamentally different operational position than the designer who sources from scratch on every project.
You do not have to give 70 to 80 percent of your purchasing to anyone. But if the brands you work with consistently fail to meet a basic standard of reliability and support, that is worth naming clearly and acting on. The designers who take sourcing seriously are not spending less time on design. They are spending less time on things that have nothing to do with it.