Your small team is stretched, and every supplier adds emails, meetings and things to track — but you don't know how few is too few.
The hidden risk
Every supplier carries overhead. With a small team, each additional supplier quietly steals focus from the ones that matter — until quality slips across all of them at once.
How to judge
Right-size by bandwidth, not ambition: keep a primary plus a tested backup per category, and only add more when you can actually manage them.
What the supplier must provide
A supplier that covers a category end-to-end, so one relationship replaces several fragmented ones.
How DONGFAN handles it
DONGFAN covers womenswear, maternity and kidswear end-to-end under one relationship — fewer suppliers to run, without losing category coverage.
Buyer checklist
- Size suppliers to team bandwidth
- Keep primary + backup per category
- Prefer end-to-end coverage
- Add suppliers only when manageable
- Watch focus drift across suppliers
- Consolidate where one covers many