Effective June 14, John Edelman ends his decade-long tenure at the top of Design Within Reach, the modernist furniture retailer he bought, resurrected and sold. The departure is amicable, partly the end of a five-year agreement with DWR parent company Herman Miller (Edelman will stay on as chairman of the board at Herman Miller Consumer Group), and partly the product of a feeling that the time had come.

“I think myself and John McPhee [DWR president, who will stay on] took [the company] where it was supposed to be,” Edelman tells Business of Home. “I signed up for a five-year deal with Herman Miller [after the acquisition]. I rolled over most of my equity, and we formed a new entity. After five years, it was time for me to sell my stake, and it seems like the right time for this.”

“I’ve never really had or wanted what you’d call a traditional ‘job,’” Edelman adds with a laugh. “A ‘job’ to me is when you don’t own the company.”

Edelman, along with McPhee, is credited with reversing DWR’s fortunes, dragging it out of a slump into profitability, then selling to Herman Miller in 2015. Originally founded by entrepreneur Rob Forbes in 1999, the company enjoyed tremendous growth in its early years, tapping into a growing appetite for modernist furniture. But by 2009, lawsuits, management problems and a sagging market were taking their toll— DWR was in serious jeopardy. Among the company’s long list of woes: too many underperforming stores, a catalog made up increasingly of knockoff designs, rock-bottom morale, and a plummeting stock price.