As he looks back on what it took to restore Levin Furniture to its presale luster, Robert Levin will always remember the legal and financial hurdles he overcame to buy back his family’s century-old business.

It’s an oft-reported tale now — How Levin, seeking retirement, sold Levin Furniture and Mattress to a larger Michigan-based company, Art Van Furniture, in November 2017. At the time the deal was completed, Art Van’s combined furniture retailers ranked among the country’s 10 largest, with 176 stores and a projected $1.3 billion in annual sales, as well as 5,500 employees.

Yet less than three years later, Art Van, owned by Thomas H. Lee Partners, a Boston-based private equity firm that specialized in leveraged buyouts, announced plans to liquidate its stores in March 2020 and a few days later filed for bankruptcy in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware in what became a liquidation, according to court documents.

Levin jumped in in an attempt to rescue the stores that had been a part of his family’s century-old business. In May, after a hard-fought battle, he reached an agreement in bankruptcy court to buy the Levin brand back — and 32 stores — for a reported bid of $25.7 million.

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Moe Tkacik, a senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project, a Washington think tank, noted there can be lessons drawn from Levin’s fight to get his company back after it so quickly faced the threat of liquidation under the private equity ownership of Thomas H. Lee Partners, which, according to published reports, took Art Van from profitable to bankrupt in three years due to both external factors and internal missteps.

“Private equity-owned firms are 10 times likelier than their nonprivate equity-owned counterparts to declare bankruptcy in a given 10-year period,” she said.