Last month, a paper sign taped to the door of a shop in Boardman, Ohio, seemed to close the book on a long-running home industry drama. The note was a warning from the state’s tax commissioner that the store, Burke Decor, was prohibited from making sales. Just weeks prior, the company had shut down its website. With both its physical and digital operations closed, it seemed safe to say that the Burke Decor saga was over.

But not quite. Business of Home has learned of the existence of a new home goods site, Studio Per Diem, that appears to be a relaunch of Burke Decor in all but name. Two sources with direct knowledge of the situation say that Burke Decor founder Erin Burke is behind the new venture. If true, it would mean that despite hundreds of unresolved customer complaints, a handful of ongoing lawsuits, and an investigation by the Ohio attorney general, Burke is back in the game.

To understand the launch of Studio Per Diem, it’s helpful to step back and look at the complex web of e-commerce businesses controlled by Erin Burke.

SETTING THE STAGE
Burke Decor was founded in the late aughts as an online destination for furniture and home decor. Though the site grew to be successful on its own, over time Burke used it as a platform to launch a handful of physical retail stores and several side businesses. One of those ventures was running e-commerce operations for a variety of outside entities, including a hotel chain and the popular mobile video game Design Home.

At the time, the Design Home partnership was novel. Within the game, players would design cartoony rooms using digital replicas of furniture and home decor. If they liked the piece enough to buy the real version for their home, they could click a link within the game and Burke Decor would handle the order. (On a Reddit thread earlier this month, Design Home fanatics lamented the closure of Burke Decor.)

Burke developed other lines of business as well, including opening two stand-alone drop-ship e-commerce sites: Babytot (dedicated to infant gifts and home decor) and Designer Rug (rugs and home goods). Neither was explicitly linked to Burke Decor, but several former employees say that customer service for the two businesses was operated through Burke Decor’s Ohio office. Both sites still appeared to be active at press time.

Finally, in the years directly before the pandemic, Burke got into a third sideline: importing. Across 2018 and 2019, Burke Decor became responsible for running the U.S. e-commerce operations of two international companies: Danish design brand Oyoy and Japanese home goods, gift and tabletop brand Puebco. As part of the arrangement, Burke Decor began receiving shipments of product from both brands at a nearby Ohio warehouse.

Selling the brands’ products through other retailers (Puebco is currently sold by both Urban Outfitters and Nordstrom) gave Burke’s operation an outside revenue stream. It also gave her a wider inventory to sell directly alongside drop-shipped goods. This came in handy throughout 2023 and 2024, as Burke Decor’s struggles became increasingly public and vendors began pulling out of the site. No matter how big the seller exodus, Burke’s team could always count on being able to list and sell the Puebco and Oyoy inventory they had stockpiled, which kept cash coming into the business.

A NEW TWIST
In the end, inventory alone wasn’t enough to buffer the Burke Decor business from its many financial problems, and earlier this year, the brand finally shuttered its website and saw its vendor license suspended by the state tax commissioner. Which brings us to the new home goods site, Studio Per Diem. It’s not clear when the Shopify-powered website officially launched, though it began attracting attention from jilted Burke Decor customers at the beginning of May. The site’s design is stylish and contemporary, and its “About” page says, “Studio Per Diem is a collective of stunning objects for everyday living that are made to last. The concept is a nod to the French adage, profit du moment présent.”

According to a former employee, Erin Burke came up with the concept for Studio Per Diem last year amid Burke Decor’s growing legal and financial turmoil. Public records back up that assessment: The domain name was registered anonymously on April 15, 2024.

Buried within the site’s fine print is a disclosure that Studio Per Diem is the “doing business as” name for an Ohio-based LLC called Atelier Côté. A close examination of state business records shows that Atelier Côté was registered last August by a “Michele Burke”—also the name of Erin Burke’s mother—at an address that corresponds to Truck World, a rest-stop business owned by Burke’s family. The LLC’s address was later changed to a UPS Store in Youngstown that was once used as a contact address for Designer Rug.

Studio Per Diem’s merchandise also corresponds to Burke’s other ventures. A good amount of its inventory is from Puebco or Oyoy. Several of its products can also be found for sale at Designer Rug and Babytot. Interestingly, as recently as this past weekend, the site was listing furniture—including pieces by Audo Copenhagen and Hem—all of which appeared to have been removed at press time.

Much about Studio Per Diem remains murky, as does the fate of Burke Decor.

Though Burke Decor’s site was shuttered and its vendor license was suspended, it’s still not precisely clear what happened to the business as a legal entity. In April its assets were listed for auction—according to a filing at the time, it was a forced sale, implemented by one of Burke Decor’s lenders, Ampla, which sued the company for more than $6 million last year. However, making matters extremely confusing, Ampla had assigned all of its rights to an entity called “La Cote I” rather than conduct the auction itself.

La Cote I is an LLC registered to the same Youngstown UPS Store used by Studio Per Diem. According to a former employee, La Cote I is owned by Erin Burke.

There are many possible explanations for this legal and financial labyrinth. One is that, rather than trying to recover its cash from a failing business, Ampla cut a deal with Burke directly, allowing her to “sell” Burke Decor’s assets—including Puebco and Oyoy inventory—back to herself and restart a version of the business under a new name to generate cash. Under such an arrangement, Burke would likely agree to flow money from Studio Per Diem’s receivables directly to Ampla.

However, it’s impossible to know for sure, and the web of businesses and legal filings around Burke remains a tangled one. None of the parties involved—including Studio Per Diem, Burke herself, Ampla, Puebco and Oyoy—responded to a request for comment.