"Cut out the middleman" gets thrown around as if it's automatically a good thing. Sometimes it is. Sometimes the middleman was doing something genuinely useful, and removing them just moves the work onto someone else's plate, usually the buyer's. It's worth being specific about what actually changes when stock moves through fewer hands, rather than assuming fewer hands is always better.
A typical indirect chain might run: manufacturer → regional importer → national wholesaler → secondary wholesaler → retailer. Each link takes a margin, and each one also adds a delay, a handling step, and another point where something can go wrong or get miscommunicated. By the time stock reaches the end retailer, the price has absorbed several markups that have nothing to do with the product itself.
Cutting out layers doesn't remove the need for someone to do the work those layers were doing. Warehousing, breaking bulk into smaller trade quantities, credit terms, local logistics, vetting who's allowed to buy: all of that still has to happen somewhere. Direct sourcing done properly doesn't skip these functions; it consolidates them under fewer, more accountable relationships instead of spreading them across a chain where no single link is fully responsible for the outcome.
This is also why "direct" isn't automatically cheaper in isolation: a supplier selling in smaller trade quantities, with proper vetting and support, has real costs of their own. The advantage isn't a magic discount; it's that the margin being paid is going toward a service that's actually adding value, rather than being absorbed by a chain of resellers passing stock along unchanged.
Procurement is the part of the business we focus on hardest, precisely because it's where a badly-run chain does the most damage. We negotiate directly with brands and manufacturers rather than buying from other distributors, which means the trade partners we supply are one step removed from the source, not five. It's more work on our end to build and maintain those direct relationships, but it's the difference between passing on a real advantage and just being another link in the same long chain.