For Portland, Oregon–founded cult-favorite home brand Schoolhouse, the last few years have been rife with dramatic twists and turns. In 2021, the company was sold to Food52 in a $48 million deal. Almost exactly five years later, Food52 laid off nearly all of Schoolhouse’s staff shortly before filing for bankruptcy and ultimately being broken up and sold at auction. In February, what remained of Schoolhouse was purchased by the Hudson Valley Lighting Group, for just $2.2 million. Just five months later, HVLG has relaunched the brand, albeit a slimmed-down version.
“We don’t want Schoolhouse to be gone for too long,” says HVLG president Malaina Matheus. “We feel like it’s important to come back with something, even a thin line with something like 500 SKUs.” She says the new parent company worked to bring back core pieces that were perennial bestsellers, like the Stillwater quilt, but HVLG did not inherit a lot of Schoolhouse’s inventory, as Food52 had liquidated much of it before winding down operations. “We didn’t get a warehouse full of product that we’re able to ship out immediately. We’re going live with as much as we can and have reordered many of the items that people will remember,” says Matheus.
The relaunch has had some hiccups. Shortly after the new site went live last week, it was briefly taken down due to pricing inaccuracies. But it was back up and running over the weekend, and Schoolhouse’s return seems to have been met with enthusiasm by customers, with some items already sold out.
For HVLG, the acquisition has been uncharted territory, as buying a company at a bankruptcy auction is completely different from a more traditional vetted and negotiated deal like its acquisition of Sonneman last year. “Nothing came prepackaged and pretty [with this deal],” says Matheus. “There’s no due diligence process. This was an asset sale. We did a lot of work at the beginning just to try to figure out where we were, what we had, what worked, what didn’t work, and so on.”
Because Food52 had let Schoolhouse’s staff go immediately before the bankruptcy filing in December, HVLG also didn’t inherit any existing employees. Matheus has rehired five prior employees and has three others working on a consultant basis, particularly those who had been working on the brand’s creative side. Operations in Portland were completely shut down prior to the takeover; moving forward, Schoolhouse will be run from HVLG’s headquarters in Wappingers Falls, New York, with manufacturing overseas.
Schoolhouse marks HVLG’s first foray outside of lighting. Matheus says textiles in particular have been a challenge for the company. “Our mantra around here is ‘If you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not growing,’ and so we’ve been growing a lot over the past few months,” she says. “More than half of Schoolhouse’s business was in lighting, and so that’s something that we know how to do. But the rest of it, things like textiles, are very far away from lighting. Textiles have been such a learning curve for us, and that’s where we really had to lean on the Schoolhouse team to help us understand just how it all works. Schoolhouse has such a perspective on textiles that I think is hard to find in other places, and our intention is to continue to dig into that.”
Schoolhouse product development was interrupted by the December layoffs; under HVLG, those unproduced designs are back in the works. “There’s plenty of new designs coming over the next year,” says Matheus.
Given HVLG’s expertise in the design trade, their team plans to make that program a priority for Schoolhouse’s next chapter. The brand will be available through HVLG’s trade portal, and already has a presence in the parent company’s High Point and Las Vegas showrooms. A consumer-facing brick-and-mortar strategy is not currently part of the plan for the brand.
Looking forward, Matheus is excited to cultivate the crossover between Schoolhouse and HVLG’s existing customer bases. “All of our acquisitions have brought us new interesting customers and categories, and I think that Schoolhouse has typically had different types of trade customers than HVLG,” she says. “There’s a bunch of Schoolhouse customers who have never bought Hudson Valley, and vice versa. It’s definitely a ‘one plus one equals three’ equation for us.”
