How do you find suppliers and business partners in fragmented industries?

One thing I’ve learned from working in fashion is that having a large industry doesn’t necessarily mean having easily accessible industry information.

Manufacturers, suppliers, workshops, service providers and specialized professionals exist — but discovering the right ones can involve websites, social networks, trade events, personal contacts and sometimes simply word of mouth.

While mapping this problem, I realized that what looks like a supply “chain” often behaves much more like a web.

Fashion is the industry I know, but I’m curious about how this happens elsewhere:

If you work in a fragmented industry, how do you currently find and evaluate suppliers, manufacturers or specialized business partners? What part of that process is still surprisingly manual?