Sourcing Without Limits

For many interior designers, the opportunity to be creative is far and away the best part of our job. There’s nothing quite like the feeling that comes from solving a client’s problem with an inspired solution — whether it’s improving traffic flow, creating storage, or just coming up with a killer design that your client falls in love with. This is our real value as design professionals: the ability to imagine what our clients can’t.

Unfortunately for many designers, implementing those creative solutions can be significantly more challenging than conceiving of them, particularly if you’re a small firm or a sole proprietor. That’s because of the barriers we face in sourcing products.

The sad truth is: You may find the perfect cabinet to fit that awkward nook in your client’s oddly shaped living room, but the manufacturer might not let you buy it — not without placing a sizable opening order and maintaining a substantial yearly minimum of purchases in order to preserve your account.

This means a whole host of design professionals are locked out of countless options for beautiful décor sold by thousands of companies across North America (and the world). And that lock-out not only prevents them from implementing their creative vision, it can also threaten their livelihood. As the online marketplace continues to expand, designers need to be able to source from multiple companies and make a decent profit on the product they sell in order to survive.

Enter The Designers Collaborative, a group of interior designers that harnesses the collective power of its members to maintain accounts with an ever-increasing number of vendors.

Our size enables us to meet the yearly minimums necessary to maintain trade accounts with a variety of manufacturers of furniture, flooring, lighting, fabric, wall-coverings, and accessories. And we are able to meet large opening order requirements with new vendors by crowd sourcing from within the group.

This means our members enjoy the freedom to shop from over 200 of the most popular manufacturers in our industry — and at the best pricing levels. Imagine what that kind of sourcing freedom could do for your business, and the creativity and profitability it could unleash.

For example, I was able to use seven different vendors to pull together this client-pleasing living room:

The Designers Collaborative empowers its members to be as creative as they want, with fewer and fewer limits on their ability to implement that creativity. Why not join us?