In furniture, you are supposed to be one thing.
A manufacturer sells to retailers. A retailer buys from manufacturers. Those are different businesses with different skills and different economics.
Ashley decided to be both, and then also to be a licensor letting other people run stores under its name.
That is three business models stacked on top of each other, which sounds like a recipe for doing all three badly.
It became the largest furniture company in America instead.
The reasons are genuinely instructive, and they explain why the furniture you see in most American living rooms costs what it costs.
They also point at something useful about how to think about the middlemen in your own financial life.
Let me lay it out.