If you own what furniture designer Edgar Blazona calls a “pandemic sofa”—or almost any recently-purchased couch—there’s a good chance that you already want to get rid of it.

Furniture sales surged during the pandemic, as people spent more time at home. That happened to coincide with a new low in furniture quality, as manufacturers continued to cut costs. (Supply chain challenges were especially bad during COVID-19, but quality arguably hasn’t improved since then.) If your sofa is a few years old, or even newer, the cushions might now be sagging or lumpy. The frame might be wobbly and creaking. The fabric might be fraying or the leather peeling off. You might have spent $3,000, expecting your new sofa to last a decade or two; instead it’s already looking worse than the old sofa you replaced.

“I’ve spent the last few years really studying why the sofas of today only last three to five years even at the so-called specialty retailers,” says Blazona, who worked with large brands like Pottery Barn in the past. Now, he runs a small company called MadeRight CA that makes sofas designed for durability, trying to fight the industry’s move toward semi-disposable furniture that quickly ends up in landfills.

Furniture manufacturers have struggled to cut costs for years. When trade opened up with China in 1999, American furniture companies tried to compete with new imports and then started shutting down factories and moving jobs overseas. In North Carolina, the center of U.S. furniture manufacturing, the industry cut half of its jobs between 1999 and 2009. Some companies that were particularly known for making higher-quality sofas in the U.S., such as Iowa-based Flexsteel, also eventually started manufacturing in Asia instead. As the pandemic put new pressure on supply chains, and the first Trump administration’s tariffs went into effect, brands tried to find new ways to maintain their margins.

Because increasing the retail price of a finished sofa is a harder sell to consumers, companies focused first on cheaper materials. “In the world of sofas, the best place to hide these........

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