The people who ask me this most often are the ones outside the industry. Two sofa sets that look identical, the same week, two different stores — thirty thousand lira apart. It is only fair to assume someone is overcharging.
Usually no one is. And I am writing this as someone who can see which side of the price the gap comes from.
I was born in İnegöl, the town where most of Turkey's furniture is made. My family has worked with wood for roughly 150 years: my great-great-grandfather was a logger in the Achara mountains, my grandfather turned timber into lumber, my father turned lumber into furniture. I grew up inside this trade and today I run a furniture brand with three stores. So I see how a price is built from the inside, not from the shop window.
The chain is shorter than people think — and the price still swells
The version you read online usually goes: workshop → wholesaler → dealer → customer, everyone adding a margin. That picture is wrong for İnegöl. Here the workshop and the store work directly with each other; there is no wholesaler link in between.
So where does the difference come from? Three places.
1. Which city the product is sold from
A store in another city buys the piece in İnegöl, adds its own margin and sells it at home. This is the single most common reason the same product carries two prices. Nobody is acting in bad faith — that margin pays for their freight, rent and staff.
2. The middleman
The person who brings a customer to a store, forwards an order to someone else, says "leave it to me". You never see their cut, but you pay it. It is usually the only line that adds nothing to the product and nothing to the service you receive.
3. The store's own cost
Rent, staff, showroom. A display piece does not sell; it sits for months, wears, and eventually leaves at a discount. That loss is spread across the pieces that do sell. This is why a large, well-located store costs a little more — and why you get to actually see the product.
"Then I'll buy straight from the maker" — I would not
Most people reach that conclusion, and my honest answer is that for most buyers it is a bad idea.
A workshop makes one or a few models; you cannot line forty of them up and compare. It will not sit down with you to work out which size fits your living room, or which fabric survives a house with children. It does not chase the delivery date, it is not there during assembly, and when a mechanism fails six months later there is no number to call.
Buying from a store is not a bad thing. The store's margin is the price of that service: displaying the product, guiding the choice of size and fabric, owning the delivery and the after-sales, being the person you call when something goes wrong.
The only unnecessary line is the one that adds nothing to the product and nothing to the service.
Is the gap always about who sells it?
No — and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Blaming the middleman is easy but incomplete. Two sets that look the same can genuinely be different products. Four items you cannot see from the outside:
The frame
Kiln-dried timber or green timber. Untreated wood releases its moisture over time, joints loosen, and the sofa starts to creak. You cannot tell in the showroom; you find out two years later.
Foam density
Of two cushions that feel equally firm, one collapses within two years and the other does not. The difference is density, and pressing it with your hand tells you nothing. Ask what the density figure is.
Fabric abrasion resistance
There is a measure called Martindale, with known minimums for domestic use. The same pattern can be woven in two different durability classes, and both look identical on the floor.
Mechanisms and hardware
Bed-opening mechanisms, runners, hinges. The part that fails first is usually the part where cost was cut hardest.
So "cheap must be bad" is not true, and neither is "expensive must be good". There is only one right question: what is inside this price?
How to tell, as a buyer
- "How many hands has this passed through before you?" Someone who answers plainly stands behind the product. Someone who brushes it off has probably bought it third-hand — and has no one to turn to when there is a problem.
- "Is the frame kiln-dried, what is the foam density, what is the Martindale rating?" Fewer sellers than you would expect can answer all three. One who can has chosen the product themselves.
- "Can you give me a firm delivery date?" A company with direct access to production can. A store at the end of the chain is waiting too, so it says "10 to 15 days" and it becomes 45. Vagueness about delivery is usually a measure of how long the chain is.
- "Does the order form state the dimensions, the fabric, the delivery date and the cancellation terms?" A furniture order agreed verbally turns into a dispute later, even when both sides mean well.
- "If something breaks in six months, who do I call?" The answer should be a name and a number, not "we'll take care of it".
What we do on our side
We are in the city where the furniture is made. We choose the product here, show it in our own store, and sell it at the same price on our website. You are not paying the margin of a store in another city, or a middleman's cut.
I am not writing this to claim we are the cheapest in Turkey — that claim would not be true for anyone. What I am saying is that we can explain where our price comes from. You can ask which workshop made it, what the frame is, what the foam density is, how durable the fabric is; there is an answer.
Every model in our catalogue stands in our own store first. We look at the fabric, the frame and the foam density ourselves. We do not sell what we would not keep — because ours is the number you will be calling.
We have three stores: Mobiliyum AVM in İnegöl, Home City AVM in Pendik, Istanbul, and Antalya. You can see a piece in the store and order it from selishome.com, with delivery and assembly anywhere in Turkey.