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For much of the past decade, manufacturers of mid-range electronics prized a single virtue above nearly all others in their supply chains: leanness. A single supplier for a given component, chosen after exhaustive vetting, could offer volume discounts, tighter quality control, and none of the coordination overhead that comes with juggling multiple vendors. That orthodoxy has been quietly dismantled over the past eighteen months, and the shift shows little sign of reversing. The catalyst was not one dramatic event but a string of smaller disruptions that, taken together, exposed how brittle the lean model had become. A factory fire at a mid-sized capacitor plant idled three major appliance brands for six weeks. A shipping-lane dispute added a month to lead times for components that had never before been delayed by more than a few days. Neither incident was large enough to make international headlines, but each was large enough to wipe out a quarter's worth of margin for the firms caught unprepared. What has replaced leanness is a doctrine some procurement officers now call "deliberate redundancy": qualifying at least two suppliers for every component judged critical to production, even when doing so raises the unit cost by several percentage points. Executives who once viewed a second supplier as an unnecessary expense now describe it as a form of insurance whose premium is worth paying. Crucially, the second supplier is not merely listed on paper; contracts increasingly require it to ship a minimum order at least twice a year, ensuring its production line stays qualified and ready to scale on short notice. The approach is not without critics. Some analysts argue that the additional cost of dual sourcing will eventually be passed to consumers, and that firms with strong balance sheets are better positioned to absorb the premium than smaller competitors, who may be squeezed out of a market that increasingly rewards redundancy over efficiency. Whether that consolidation follows remains to be seen, but for now, few procurement officers seem willing to bet their production schedule on a single supplier again.