How I Vetted a Hearth Systems Supplier for Wholesale—And Where My First Shortlist Went Wrong

The spreadsheet that started it all

In January 2024, I sat in our office in Boise staring at a vendor spend report that didn't make sense. We're a 90-person building products distributor—roofing on one side, interior finishes and hearth products on the other—and my job as office administrator is to keep the purchasing side running without anyone in operations having to think about it. That includes roughly $740,000 a year in vendor orders across 11 suppliers. I report to both the operations director and our finance lead, which means when something goes sideways, I hear about it from two directions.

The report showed we were buying fireplace inserts and hearth accessories from four different vendors, none of them particularly well. Two of them had sent the wrong SKU at least once in the previous year. One had invoicing issues that took me three weeks to reconcile. The fourth was fine but expensive. I'd been meaning to consolidate for months. January is when I finally had the bandwidth to do something about it.

What I didn't anticipate was how much I'd learn about my own vetting process—specifically, how much of it was built on assumptions that used to be reasonable and weren't anymore.

The shortlist I thought was solid

My first step was to send a basic RFQ to seven hearth systems suppliers I'd either worked with before or found through a building products directory. Nothing fancy—just a request for wholesale pricing on a defined list of gas fireplace inserts, wood stove components, and venting kits. I asked about lead times, minimum order quantities, and whether they supported private label or OEM arrangements, since our contractor customers sometimes wanted their own branding on the box.

Four responded with quotes. Three didn't respond at all, which I noted but didn't disqualify. (Should mention: I learned later that two of those three only sell through a specific rep network and don't take direct RFQs. That's a legitimate business model, just not one I could access.)

Here's where I made my first mistake. I ranked the four quotes primarily on unit price and lead time, because that's what our previous consolidation projects had prioritized. The lowest quote came from a supplier I'll call Vendor A. Their pricing was 12% below our current average, their stated lead time was four weeks, and they offered private label with a 200-unit minimum. On paper, this was exactly what we needed.

I put them at the top of my shortlist and moved on to checking references.

The reference call that changed everything

Vendor A gave me three references. I called all three. Two were positive but vague—"good pricing, no major issues"—which I've learned to treat as a yellow flag rather than a green one. Vague positive references usually mean the person doesn't want to say anything bad but also doesn't have anything specific to praise.

The third reference was different. This was a purchasing manager at a regional distributor in Colorado, and when I asked about order accuracy, she paused.

"How much time do you have?" she said.

She explained that Vendor A's pricing was genuinely competitive. But their order fulfillment had a pattern: first orders were usually fine. Repeat orders were where things broke down. Wrong quantities, substituted parts without notification, and—this is the part that got me—invoicing that didn't match the purchase order, requiring manual reconciliation. She'd spent, by her estimate, four to six hours a month fixing Vendor A's mistakes. She kept them on because the pricing was good, but she was actively looking for alternatives.

I don't have hard data on industry-wide order accuracy rates, but based on the four suppliers we were already working with and the feedback from that call, my sense is that first-order performance is a poor predictor of ongoing reliability. The vendors who impress you in the first 90 days aren't always the ones who hold up in year two.

So I dropped Vendor A. Not because they were bad—the pricing was real—but because the hidden cost of managing their errors would have landed on my desk, and I didn't have the bandwidth for that.

What I got wrong about "specification guidance"

After the Vendor A situation, I re-read the responses from the other three. Vendor B was mid-priced but mentioned "compliance support" and "specification guidance" in their response. I'll be honest: I initially skimmed past that. I was looking for price, lead time, and MOQ. The compliance language felt like marketing.

Then I thought about something that had happened six months earlier. We'd sold a batch of fireplace inserts to a contractor in Utah who was doing a multi-family project. The inserts met our stated specs, but the contractor's inspector flagged the installation clearance requirements—something about how the insert was rated for the application. We weren't at fault technically, but we spent two weeks going back and forth with the contractor and the inspector, and I ended up eating the cost of a partial return just to keep the relationship intact.

If a supplier had flagged that upfront—if someone had said, "Hey, for multi-family in that jurisdiction, you may want the model with this specific listing"—we could have avoided the entire mess.

That's when I started taking Vendor B's "specification and compliance guidance" seriously. I asked them for two things: any documentation they had on regional compliance differences for hearth products, and whether they'd be willing to review a project spec sheet before we placed a bulk order. They came back with a two-page summary that wasn't glamorous but was clearly written by someone who knew the material. They also said yes to the spec review, with a 24-hour turnaround.

I'm not a code compliance specialist, so I can't speak to the specifics of every jurisdiction—that's genuinely outside my lane. What I can tell you from a purchasing perspective is that a supplier who helps you avoid those problems is worth a premium, as long as the premium is reasonable and documented.

The roofing side of the equation

While I was untangling the hearth side, I was also evaluating roofing suppliers for the commercial side of our business. We move a fair amount of metal roofing and underlayment, and I'd been asked to look at whether we should expand into a private label roofing membrane for our contractor customers.

I applied the same lessons here. The cheapest private label option wasn't the right one, and the first reference call I made—to a distributor in Portland—was remarkably similar to the hearth situation. The Portland distributor had tried a private label membrane from the lowest bidder and had spent six months dealing with warranty claim questions that the manufacturer wouldn't answer directly. She called it "a six-month headache that looked like a four-figure savings on paper."

By contrast, the supplier we eventually went with—Vendor B, who also happened to have a roofing membrane line—charged about 8% more than the lowest bid. But they included warranty documentation, a clearly defined claim process, and a single point of contact for dealer issues. For us, that 8% was worth it. When a contractor calls me about a leaking membrane, I need to be able to hand them a phone number and a document, not an email chain that goes nowhere.

Where it landed

We consolidated from four hearth suppliers to two: Vendor B for the bulk of our fireplaces, inserts, and wood stoves, and a smaller supplier for specialty parts. We kept our existing roofing underlayment vendor and added the private label membrane through Vendor B as well, with a six-month pilot.

The numbers held up. Order accuracy in the first six months was 97% versus our previous baseline that, honestly, I'd never actually measured. I should add that I now track it. That was another lesson from this project: if you're going to evaluate suppliers, you need a baseline, and I hadn't had one.

What surprised me wasn't the accuracy improvement. It was how much time I wasn't spending on vendor follow-up. I estimated I'd been spending about five hours a month on mistakes and reconciliation with the old roster. Those hours are mostly gone. That's not a dramatic number, but it compounds.

There's something satisfying about opening a vendor portal and seeing that the order shipped on time, at the right spec, with documentation attached. After years of chasing those details manually, finally having a process that holds together—it feels like getting a small piece of my job back.

What I'd do differently

A few things, if I ran this project again:

First, I'd ask about ongoing order accuracy, not just first-order quality. The reference call matters more than the RFQ response. Vendors can write a good quote. They can't fake a pattern of repeat orders.

Second, I'd weight compliance and specification support more heavily from the start. Not because I care about compliance as a concept, but because the downstream cost of a compliance issue is high and unevenly distributed. It falls on whoever sold the product, and that's us.

Third—and this is the one that took me longest to internalize—I'd stop treating supplier evaluation as a price comparison exercise. What was best practice in 2019, when I started managing these orders, doesn't fully apply now. Back then, the information asymmetry was real: you couldn't easily find out how a supplier performed two years in. Now, between reference networks and increasingly transparent spec documentation, the vendors who survive are the ones who treat accuracy and support as part of the product. The pricing is still important. It's just not the whole picture.

The fundamentals of vendor management haven't changed: do they deliver what they said, when they said, at the price they said. But the execution has transformed, and the suppliers I keep are the ones who understand that.

If you're going through a similar consolidation, my advice is simple: make the reference call. Ask about repeat orders. Ask what happens when something goes wrong. The answers will tell you more than any quote ever will.