Manoukian, a French manufacturer of knitwear for women, also discovered that running a downstream channel is harder that it look. Highly successful when selling knitwear through franchisees, the firm developed an ambitious growth strategy. It transformed itself into a full-line clothing maker, developing a men’s collection and several women’s collections at different price points and levels of style. Simultaneously, Manoukian became a clothing retailer by replacing franchisees with company owned stores. The idea was to benefit from control. Rather than convince franchisees to go along with the new product strategy, the supplier could simply tell its own stores to do so.