Most interior designers do procurement whether they meant to or not. You specified the scheme, so you end up ordering it, chasing it, and standing in the hallway when it arrives damaged.

This is a description of what that work actually consists of, what it costs you, and what changes when someone else does it.

What a procurement house is, precisely

A retailer sells you what it stocks. A manufacturer sells you what its workshop can build. A procurement house sells you neither — it is paid to find the right route for every item on a schedule and then carry the whole chain.

That distinction sounds academic until you look at a real schedule. A single residential project might need an Italian sofa from a brand you hold no account with, a dining table that does not exist as a product, forty linear metres of fitted joinery, curtains, a mattress specification and eleven decorative pieces. Four of those come from suppliers. Three have to be made. One is discontinued and nobody has told you yet.

No single supplier covers that. Someone has to route each line to the place that can actually deliver it, and then make all of it arrive on the same day.

The work you are currently doing for free

Break down what happens between “client approves the scheme” and “furniture is in the house”:

Getting prices. Eleven suppliers, several currencies, response times between two days and never. Perhaps a third of the quotations come back priced on a basis different from what you asked for.

Checking the delivery basis. A supplier quotes EXW and you read it as delivered. That gap — factory door to your client’s living room — is a real number, and it appears as an invoice weeks later. Brand sales administrators get Incoterms wrong regularly, and it is not their money.

Chasing confirmations. Orders that were placed but not acknowledged. Fabric that was specified but never ordered, discovered in week nine.

Managing lead times. Every supplier has its own, ranging from four weeks to six months, and only the longest one matters for the install date.

Coordinating delivery. Nine suppliers who each want to deliver on a different day, into a house that has one available week.

Handling what goes wrong. A cracked slab, a scratched veneer, a sofa that will not go up the stairs.

None of this is design work. It is administration with financial consequences, and on a mid-sized residential project it can run to several weeks of your time. Time you are usually not charging for, because it does not look like a deliverable.

Where designer margin actually comes from

There are three honest places, and it is worth being clear about which is which.

Design fees. Cleanest, and entirely yours.

Trade discount on branded goods. You buy at trade and sell at or near list, keeping the difference. This works, but it depends on the size of the discount your accounts give you, and a single studio’s annual spend rarely earns the best tier.

The margin on bespoke and sourced items. Bigger, and much less visible to the client, because there is no list price to compare against.

A procurement house affects the second and third. Our accounts aggregate across every project we run rather than one studio’s spend, so the discount tier is generally better than a practice achieves alone. On bespoke work the gap is wider still, because manufacturing route makes more difference than negotiation ever will.

What you do with that difference is your business. Keep it as margin, or pass it to the client and win a job you would otherwise have lost on price. We do not have a view, and we do not need to know which you chose.

The relationship question

The first thing every designer asks, usually carefully, is whether we will go around them.

We will not, and it is contractual rather than a matter of goodwill. We do not contact your client during the project, after it, or for marketing. Your name goes on the scheme. Ours appears on the delivery note if you want it there and nowhere at all if you do not.

The commercial arrangement is a signed profit-share: agreed before the project, per project, with the item-by-item numbers visible to you before anything is ordered. If you want to know our cost on a line, ask.

This matters more than it might seem. The reason designers are cautious about procurement partners is that a supplier who meets your client has an obvious incentive to remember them. Making that structurally impossible is worth more than promising it.

What you hand over, and what you keep

You keep: the client relationship, the design, the specification, the presentation, the aesthetic decisions, the credit.

You hand over: supplier selection and negotiation, costing, order placement, drawings and samples administration, production quality control, freight, Incoterms, customs, warehousing, delivery scheduling, installation and snagging.

You still do: approve drawings and samples. That is the one part that cannot be delegated, because only you know whether the stone reads correctly against the floor.

What to send when you start

Whatever you have. A schedule, a drawing set, a moodboard, or a paragraph. On a first pass we can price from surprisingly little, and we will tell you what else is needed to be precise.

The useful things, if they exist: room dimensions, a specification level, a target date, and whether installation is wanted.

The honest limitation

Procurement adds a party to a project, and that is not free. On a very small job — one sofa, two chairs — it is not worth anyone’s time, and you should buy it yourself.

The value scales with complexity. It starts being obvious somewhere around the point where a schedule crosses three suppliers and two countries, and it becomes overwhelming on a full house or a development.

If you send us something and the honest answer is that you would be better off ordering it directly, we will say so.

BPH is a furniture and joinery procurement house in London. See how we work with designers, or start a project.