Floyd, the Detroit-based direct-to-consumer furniture brand, has been acquired. The buyer is Rize Home, a Cleveland-based company that manufactures and imports beds and bedding. Financial terms of the deal—which was first reported by Furniture Today—were not disclosed.

Floyd Home started in 2013 as a simple project between entrepreneurs Kyle Hoff and Alex O’Dell: Manufacture an adjustable leg that could be used to turn any flat surface (a plywood board, a plexiglass slab, you name it) into a table. The two launched the product on Kickstarter, hoping to raise $18,000. They brought in $256,000 instead, and a brand was born.

Over the past decade, Floyd has evolved from a single leg into a whole-home brand, offering beds, desks, seating and storage. Along the way, the company’s journey followed the beats of what has become a familiar story in the DTC realm: A successful launch on a crowdfunding platform followed by buzzy media coverage, growth on social media, and piles of venture money. (By 2021, Floyd had raised $25 million.)

However, in recent years, the undulations of the Covid boom-and-crash had made the business more difficult, pushing the Floyd founders to seek a deal. “One of the big challenges over the last four years has been on the back end: sourcing and logistics,” says Hoff. “[Rize Home] is really good at those things. The next phase of Floyd is an opportunity for us to continue putting out great products and telling stories, and having more support on the operational, behind-the-scenes stuff.”

Founded over 75 years ago as Mantua Manufacturing Company, Rize Home made traditional bed frames for the first half-century of its life. In the 2000s, the company expanded into other categories, notably adjustable beds. The business is primarily wholesale-focused, selling to retailers across the spectrum, from mom-and-pop to big-box.

Owner and CEO David Jaffe, who purchased Rize roughly a decade ago, says that acquiring Floyd is part of a bigger shift in his company’s approach. “To be successful in the retail world, you need a good omnichannel strategy,” he says. “We’ve always been just through retail, and we’re at the mercy of the success of those retailers. It’s been a great business for us, and we love our customers, but there’s a lot less connection [to] the end consumer.”

Going forward, Rize Home will take over sourcing and back-end logistics for Floyd, freeing up Hoff and O’Dell to focus on product development, marketing and brand-building. Floyd’s core team will stay based in Detroit. As part of the transition, Jaffe says the company may begin exploring limited distribution of Floyd through some retail stores—by now, a not-unfamiliar path for brands that were once exclusively direct-to-consumer only.

Jaffe and Hoff say there will be no change to the brand’s aesthetic and product quality, but they are hopeful that the partnership will lead to tangible change. “We feel really strongly that the Floyd brand is the Floyd brand, and we’re not trying to merge it with the Rize brand,” says Jaffe. But, “operational efficiencies are going to get better, [there will be] shorter lead times. … And I think by [us] taking on a lot of the back-end stuff, they can focus on developing new products.”

Though the high highs and low lows of the past decade in DTC have caused many founders to jump ship shortly after an acquisition, Hoff is committed to the long haul with Floyd: “I’m invigorated to build and launch new products, and go after a larger vision.”