These finds would form the core of Ashwell's Shabby Chic business for many years.
Though Ashwell emphasized practical furniture with character, she also had a touch of sophistication. She especially enjoyed finding and including crystal chandeliers in her decorating schemes. As Mary Berth Breckenridge of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette wrote, "Ashwell's style is at once easy and elegant, making unlikely partners of elements like rumpled fabrics and crystal chandeliers. Most of all, it's practical."
By 1991, Ashwell had three Shabby Chic stores, opening additional locations in New York City and San Francisco, California. She later added a store in Chicago, Illinois. While each store sold Shabby Chic products, she geared what was found in each store toward the style and clientele it would attract in each city.
Shabby Chic also expanded the kind of products it carried. Ashwell first branched out into home textiles, like sheets and fabrics. Many of her fabrics were poplins and linens in her signature colors. In the late 1990s, she also added Shabby Chic Man to appeal to male consumers, Shabby Chic Home, which
included bedding, and Rachel Ashwell Designs Collection, which featured new furniture in the mode of the restored pieces that she sold at her stores.
Some of these products created trends in the home decorating industry. Ashwell was among the first to popularize the concept of knitted bed sheets in the late 1990s. Because she favored a jeans and T-shirt lifestyle, she believed the latter fabric would make great bedding, a trend which other companies began to follow. Similarly, many companies started selling new, distressed furniture.
Ashwell continued to expand her own ideas to stay ahead of the market. She added pajamas and aromatherapy products to the Shabby Chic Home line. She also introduced three new product lines: Shabby Chic Studio, a less expensive line of furniture; Shabby Chic Baby, which featured bedding and accessories for infants; and Shabby Chic Accessories, a line of lampshades, chair pads, and backpacks.
Between 1996 and 2004, Ashwell penned four books showcasing different aspects of her Shabby Chic design concept. Shabby Chic, published in 1996, was primarily a book of photos of homes done in Ashwell's decorating style. In 1998, she published Rachel Ashwell's Shabby Chic Treasure Hunting & Decorating Guide, a handbook on how to shop at flea markets and garage sales to purchase and create one's own Shabby Chic furniture. She followed this with 2000's The Shabby Chic Home and 2001's The Shabby Chic Gift of Giving. The latter was a guide for finding unusual gifts in antique stores and flea markets and wrapping them with flair. Shabby Chic: Sumptuous Settings and Other Lovely Things was scheduled for publication in March of 2004.

Because of Ashwell's success with Shabby Chic, she was a guest on shows on HGTV (Home and Garden Television). By 2000, Ashwell was a home and how to expert with her own program on E! Entertainment Television and its related Style Network. She displayed her style on her show Rachel Ashwell's Shabby Chic. Of her philosophy as an interior designer, Ashwell told Glenna Morton from about.com , "One of my pet peeves is too much matching, clutter, frills, and people being too quick to complete the decorating process. The solution is to simplify. Be without, rather than making a wrong quick choice. Less is more."