Furniture Procurement, Fully Managed
We source, order, and coordinate your entire furniture order, giving you access to discounted supplier pricing while removing the time, stress, and risk of managing it yourself.
Twenty pieces, eleven
suppliers, one project
A furnished room is rarely one purchase. It is a sofa from one country, lighting from another, a rug that ships in six weeks and a dining table that turns out to be discontinued. Each supplier has its own account, its own invoice, its own delivery window and its own idea of what counts as a reply. Managing that is not difficult work, it is relentless work, and it is where furnishing projects quietly go wrong.
Multiple suppliers
Separate accounts, payments, invoices and email threads for every brand you order from.
Delivery coordination
Items arriving weeks apart, into a home that may not be ready, or that you may not be in.
Order management
Confirmations to track, updates to chase and changes to push through before production starts.
Damages and returns
Wrong item, damaged in transit, delayed indefinitely. All resolvable, all slow, all in another language.
Two ways in,
one process
How this starts depends on whether we have designed the room. After that first step the process is identical, and in both cases nothing is ordered until you have seen the final numbers.
| You have a design project with us | Towards the end of the project your designer shares your selection boards: the pieces you have been working through together, usually with an alternative or two, put together around the budget you set. You go through and mark the ones you would like to buy. That is a shortlist, not an order, and nothing on it commits you to anything. |
| You are coming to us for procurement alone | Send us the list you already have, whether you put it together yourself or another designer did. We will tell you what we can source, what carries a discount and what you are better off buying direct. |
From either starting point, the next four steps are the same.
We make you an offer
Availability, lead times, supplier pricing, the discount on each item and delivery costs, set out for you against our fee.
You decide what to buy
Approve all of it, some of it or none of it. This is the point where a shortlist becomes an order, and not before.
You pay, we order
Once the final costs are agreed and settled, the orders go in, raised in your name.
We run it to delivery
Tracking, chasing and resolving, with updates as things move rather than when you ask for them.
Four inputs, and you can
run the sum yourself
Our procurement fee is built from four things: a base fee covering the initial sourcing and setup, a handling fee per item, a handling fee per supplier, and a fee based on the value of the order. Items and suppliers are in there because that is what drives the actual work. Twelve pieces from nine different suppliers is a considerably harder job than twelve pieces from two, whatever they cost.
You do not have to take our word for any of it. The procurement calculator is public: put in your order value, your number of items and your number of suppliers, and it will show you the four components and the total before you speak to anybody. Most procurement services will not tell you how their fee is calculated even after you ask. We publish the formula.
The figure it gives you is an indicative estimate. We confirm the exact fee in writing, alongside the itemised goods costs, before anything is ordered.
Open book, itemised
We hold trade accounts across a wide range of European and international brands, and where an account carries a discount it reaches you rather than staying with us. Discounts run from around five to forty per cent depending on the supplier, and they vary enough that an average is close to meaningless.
So we itemise. Your proposal shows the discount applied to each piece and what it saves against normal retail, alongside VAT and delivery, before you commit to anything. You are looking at two numbers rather than one blended figure: what the goods cost, and what we charge to manage them. That is what open book means, and it is easy to say and harder to actually put in writing.
Not every brand carries a trade account, and not every account carries a discount worth having. Where the honest answer is that you should buy something directly yourself, we will tell you. You can see the shape of the network on our supplier network page.
We act as your agent,
not as a shop
We are not buying furniture and reselling it to you at a margin. We are ordering it on your behalf, as your agent, and every invoice is raised in your name. You are the buyer on the paperwork for every piece in the house.
That matters most on the day something goes wrong two years from now. A frame fails, a mechanism sticks, a finish lifts. Because the purchase is yours, the warranty sits between you and the supplier directly, and you can pursue it yourself without going through us, without needing us to still hold that account, and without depending on us being here at all. Plenty of clients never think about this at the point of buying. It is the one that matters longest.
It is also the reason the rest of this page can work the way it does. There are two ways to sell furniture as part of a design service, and they are not variations on a theme. They are opposite arrangements.
An agent, which is what we are
- Buys on your behalf, so invoices are raised in your name
- Passes on one hundred per cent of the trade discount
- Charges a separate, visible fee for the work of procuring
- Publishes how the fee is calculated, so you can check it yourself
- Leaves the warranty between you and the supplier
A reseller, which is the other model
- Buys in its own name and sells the item on to you
- Keeps some or all of the trade discount as margin
- Quotes one price, with the margin inside it
- Gives you no way to see what the margin actually is
- Sits between you and the supplier on any claim
Both are legitimate ways to run a business, and plenty of good studios resell. The difficulty is that from the outside you usually cannot tell which one you are dealing with, because a single quoted price looks the same either way. Ours is the first column, and the itemised proposal is how you can check rather than take our word for it.
Everything arriving
on the same day
The default is that pieces are delivered to you as they become available, which means a series of delivery windows spread over weeks. As an add-on, we can hold everything in storage as it arrives, then deliver the whole order to the property in a single day, with assembly of most items included.
It is the difference between six weeks of waiting in for couriers and one day at the end of which the room is finished. It is worth the most on a full home, a rental changeover, or where you are not living locally while the work is happening.
This has to be agreed in advance rather than added later, because it changes where things are shipped to from the moment the first order is placed. Raise it on the first call and we will quote it alongside the procurement fee. Some items cannot be assembled by us, and we will say which at the point of quoting rather than on the day.
One item sets
the whole timeline
A furnishing schedule is not an average of its lead times, it is the longest one. Order nineteen pieces that arrive in three weeks and one upholstered sofa quoted at fourteen, and the project finishes in fourteen weeks. People are consistently surprised by this, because the list looks fast when you scan it.
It is why we confirm lead times before you approve rather than after, and why it is sometimes worth substituting one piece to pull a completion date forward by two months. That decision can only be made if somebody has actually looked at the dates across every supplier at the same time, which is most of what this service is.
What people ask before booking
Do I need to have used your design service?
No, this is a stand-alone service. Plenty of clients arrive with a list they have put together themselves, or one from another designer, and want the ordering handled. Send it over and we will price the procurement on it.
How much will I save?
It depends entirely on what is on your list, because discounts vary by supplier from around five to forty per cent. Rather than quote an average, we itemise the saving on every piece in your proposal so you can see the real figure before committing, set against our fee.
Which brands can you source?
A wide range of European and international furniture, lighting and accessory brands, and we can also commission bespoke pieces through joinery and upholstery workshops. Send us your list and we will tell you which items we can source, which carry a discount and which you are better off buying directly.
Do I pay you or the suppliers?
You approve the full cost first, then pay before the orders are placed. Nothing goes to a supplier until you have seen the numbers and agreed to them.
What happens if something arrives damaged?
We deal with it. Photographing, reporting, chasing the replacement and pursuing the supplier is the part of this service people underestimate until they have done it themselves in a language they do not speak. The claim is still yours, since the invoice is in your name, but you do not have to be the one making it.
I am already working with an Akiva designer. What happens?
Your designer shares your selection boards near the end of the project, containing the pieces you have discussed together and usually an alternative or two, worked to your budget. You mark what you would like to buy, which is a shortlist rather than an order, and we come back with a proposal on those items with the discounts passed on. You then decide what to go ahead with.
Whose name are the invoices in?
Yours. We order as your agent rather than buying and reselling to you, so every purchase invoice is raised in your name. It means the warranty on each piece sits between you and the supplier directly, and you can pursue it years later without coming through us.
Can you deliver everything at once and assemble it?
Yes, as an add-on covering storage, single-day delivery and assembly of most items. It needs agreeing before the first order is placed, because it changes the delivery address from the outset.
Which countries do you deliver to?
Anywhere in Europe, subject to what each supplier will ship. Some brands restrict which countries they deliver to, which is one of the things we check before you approve rather than after you have paid.
Can you place the furniture once it arrives?
Assembly is part of the delivery add-on. Deciding where everything goes and how it is arranged is a different job, and that is interior styling, sold by the hour. Clients doing a full home often take both together.
What if I still need the design done?
Then start there. Our interior design packages produce the scheme and the shopping list, and procurement picks up from that list if you want it.