Is your furniture supplier overcharging you?

“Overcharging” is usually the wrong mental model. Incumbent prices drift for structural reasons: nobody re-tests them. The useful question is not whether your supplier is dishonest — it is whether your price would survive contact with the current market.

Signals worth taking seriously

• Increases that outpace their stated drivers. Material surcharges that arrive with each contract round but never reverse when inputs fall.
• A price that has never been benchmarked. If the number was set at the start of the relationship and has only ever moved upward by negotiation, its link to the market is untested by definition.
• Widening gaps on comparable products. New quotes for similar constructions coming in visibly below what you pay on the established line.
• Quote opacity. Reluctance to break out packaging, tooling or material lines — opacity is not proof of anything, but it prevents verification, which amounts to the same risk.
• Comfortable dependence. Years of smooth supply with no competitive event. Comfort is valuable; unexamined comfort is priced.

The legitimate reasons prices rise

Fairness cuts both ways. Timber, foam, fabric and hardware inputs move; labour costs rise across origins; exchange rates shift; your own order pattern may have changed — smaller, more frequent orders are genuinely more expensive to serve; and specification creep adds real cost quietly. A supplier absorbing volatility for you deserves that context in the assessment. Reading the quotation itself carefully — field by field — often resolves half the suspicion before any market test.

The market-quote method

The only evidence that settles the question is the current market, asked properly: your specification, priced by relevant factories, brought onto one commercial basis, with your current price placed against the resulting interval. Inside the interval: the relationship is competitive — document it and stop wondering. At the top edge: context for the next conversation. Above it: a negotiation you now enter with evidence instead of a feeling.

Discretion, deliberately

A market check does not require confronting anyone. The test is built on the product specification, and what you disclose to your incumbent afterwards — and whether the result becomes a renegotiation, a dual-sourcing move or quiet reassurance — stays in your hands.

Decision thresholds, decided in advance

Set the thresholds before you see the numbers: the gap at which you simply renegotiate; the gap at which you test an alternative in parallel; and the gap at which switching cost, tooling and transition risk still argue for staying. Deciding the thresholds first keeps the eventual number from arguing with you. When you are ready, validate the current price against the market.