Every brand,
one card.

The supplier directory you never had time to build.

Every designer keeps a mental list of suppliers: the good lighting people, the mill that does the right linen, the brand that actually ships to the UK inside eight weeks. VADE turns that list into something real and searchable, built from the products you were saving anyway. No data entry, no maintenance.

Next time you need “that brass place”, it is one click away, with their contacts, their trade status, and every piece you have ever loved from them.

Why this is how designers actually work.

Designers do not source from thousands of suppliers. They go back to the same fifteen to twenty, because those are the ones whose lead times are honest, whose samples arrive, and whose trade terms are worth having. Designers talk about trade discounts in the range of 20% to 40%, with 25% treated as the sweet spot, and those relationships take years to build. A directory of ten thousand brands you have never dealt with is not much use against a list of twenty you trust.

The failure mode is famous and completely mundane. You present a sofa, the client approves it, and then nobody can remember which supplier it came from. The image survived in the deck. The link did not. What follows is reverse image searching your own presentation, scrolling six weeks of browser history, or emailing two suppliers to ask whether the piece was theirs.

That is the gap the vendor card closes. The supplier is attached to the product from the moment it is saved, so approval and ordering never become an investigation. It is also why designers describe sourcing as “35% designing and 65% logistics”: most of that 65% is re-finding things you already found.

One vendor card, walked through.

In March you save a plaster wall light from a small studio you found through a photograph of somebody else’s hallway. It is your first save from that brand, so a vendor card appears: their logo, the hero from their homepage, their Instagram, a contact address, and a trade-status signal picked up from the site. You spend no time on it because there is nothing to do.

Over the summer you save four more of their pieces across two schemes: a pair of sconces for a stairwell, a pendant that never got approved, a table lamp for a snug. All five sit under the one card without you filing anything.

In October a client approves the stairwell sconces. You open the vendor card, take the contact address, and email them about lead times and trade terms, which is a conversation you have with a human being rather than with software. While you are there you can see the five pieces you have specified from them and the palette range they occupy in your library, which is how you notice that this is quietly your warm-plaster supplier.

Total time spent building that record: none. It was a by-product of saving five products over seven months.

What this is not.

This is not a supplier directory and it will not find you new suppliers. There is no marketplace, no paid brand placement and no feed of vendors you have never heard of. It records the suppliers you already use, and its whole value is that everything on it came from your own sourcing rather than somebody’s advertising budget.

It also does not negotiate on your behalf and it does not track orders. VADE will not open a trade account, will not chase a delivery, will not tell you what stage a made-to-order piece is at, and will not raise a purchase order. Trade status on a card is a signal read from a public site, which means it is a reason to ask a question rather than an answer to one.

VADE is not a procurement or project-management suite. No invoicing, no payments, no scheduling. If you want a tool that runs the whole project workflow, our comparison with Programa explains honestly where the line sits and why we have chosen to stay on this side of it.

What else it unlocks.

The vendor card exists because of the one-click save, which recognises the brand from the domain, so the directory is a free by-product of ordinary sourcing. It pays back into colour search, where seeing the palette range a supplier occupies in your library tells you who you go to for warm neutrals and who you go to for saturated colour. When you build a moodboard, the supplier travels with every product on it, and when that board goes out as a client-ready link you can hide the supplier contacts and trade prices per share.

Questions, answered.

How are vendor cards created?

Automatically. Every time you save a product, VADE recognises the brand from its domain and builds or updates a vendor card, pulling the homepage hero, logo, social links and contact details. You never maintain it by hand.

What is on a vendor card?

The brand's hero image and logo, its socials and contact details, an indication of trade status, and every product you have saved from that brand grouped in one place. Over time it becomes a personal directory of every supplier you have ever sourced from.

Can it tell me if a brand offers trade accounts?

VADE captures trade-status signals on the vendor card so you can see at a glance which brands you can buy from well. It is the context a spreadsheet of supplier names never gives you. It is a signal read from the public site, not a confirmed account status, so treat it as a prompt to ask rather than a guarantee.

Does the vendor library work across all my saves?

Yes. Every save belongs to a vendor, so the directory grows with your library, independent of any one project. Switch to a brand and see everything you have ever specified from it, across every scheme and every year.

Will VADE find me new suppliers?

No, and it does not pretend to. There is no marketplace, no sponsored brand listing and no discovery feed. The vendor library records the suppliers you already source from and makes them retrievable. Finding new ones is still done the way it has always been done: trade shows, other designers, and falling down a rabbit hole at eleven at night.

Does it work with small independent suppliers?

Yes, and they are usually the ones it helps most. A one-person ceramics studio or a mill with a hand-built website is exactly the sort of supplier that never appears in a closed catalogue. Save a product from them once and the vendor card exists from that moment, with whatever the public site publishes on it.

What if a vendor card gets the brand details wrong?

Edit it. Automatic enrichment reads the public site, so a brand with an unusual domain, a redirect or a very sparse homepage can come back thin or slightly off. Anything on the card can be corrected by hand, including the contact you actually deal with rather than the generic inbox, and the correction sticks.

What does it cost, and does it replace my project tool?

The vendor library is part of the free plan. Solo is £12 a month and Studio is £29 a month for up to five seats, and you can cancel from billing settings. It sits alongside whatever you already run projects in rather than replacing it, because VADE is not a procurement or project-management suite: no purchase orders, no invoicing, no payments, no scheduling.