Design company F. Schumacher & Co. has acquired Tillett Textiles, the Sheffield, Massachusetts–based company originally founded in New York in 1946 by D.D. and Leslie Tillett. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed, but the deal was made final in late May.
The original company, which went through multiple iterations and names—including Tillett Fabrics, House of T Fabrics, and D.D. and Leslie Tillett Inc.—formally shut down in 2009, and was revived as Tillett Textiles in 2016 by the founding couple’s step-grandson, Patrick McBride. Now McBride is ready to move on, and has found a place for the brand at Schumacher.
“We were excited about the opportunity to provide a good home for Tillett, which we’ve always had an admiration for,” says Timur Yumusaklar, Schumacher’s president and CEO. “I think, together with Sister Parish, Tillett played a really unique role in broadening our perspective on printed textiles in the ’60s and ’70s. We’re very excited about the acquisition.”
The fabric house rose to prominence for its vivid, hand-printed fabrics, becoming a favorite of tastemakers like Jacqueline Kennedy, Babe Paley and Albert Hadley in the 1960s. Sister Parish used Tillett prints when designing the Kennedys’ private living quarters at the White House—a fact referenced in the brand’s archive and discovered by the Schumacher team via a letter from the then first lady in which she sketched her vision for how a certain Tillett fabric would be upholstered on a sofa.
With that spirit enduring, Tillett has long been a fabric house that designers could turn to for bespoke creations, altering colors and adding details, like a striped ground instead of a solid, until it felt just right. “That openness and back-and-forth with the brand’s customers has been integral to their legacy, and we plan to continue that,” says Yumusaklar. “We want to make Tillett accessible, but also honor that uniqueness and bespokeness so that every designer can realize their own dream with a print.”
On June 25, Mason Lane Art Advisory founder Katharine Earnhardt—who works on projects across North America and the United Kingdom—shares her expertise on sourcing and selling art. Click here to learn more and remember, workshops are free for BOH Insiders
We want to hear your thoughts! Take BOH’s annual reader survey, an 8-minute questionnaire that helps us get to know you better and will allow us to tailor our storytelling to your business needs.
Tillett will continue to produce unique hand-printed fabrics and bespoke commissions; it will also expand into custom wallpapers, which will be printed at Schumacher’s Paramount Prints facility in New Jersey. Operations at the former Tillett facility in Sheffield, Massachusetts, have been wound down, and Katarina Ostbye, Schumacher’s former associate director of business development, has stepped into the role of president of Tillett. “The brand’s history is so rich—we took possession of 800 screens—that there is still so much we’re uncovering,” says Ostbye, noting that McBride’s operation had about 200 of those prints in production. “Some of these patterns haven’t been seen since the ’60s, so it’s like a treasure hunt for us.” (There were no digital records of any of the patterns, so creating scanned forms of the screens will be a crucial part of the acquisition process.)
At the moment, Ostbye says that the team is focused on fulfilling orders from existing Tillett customers, and plans to launch the first new collections in 2026. A strategy for showroom representation is also still in development, but Yumusaklar says that the primary focus will be on markets where the brand has traditionally had a following—namely, Boston, New York and Palm Beach. “The look is not necessarily coastal, but the colors are very vivid and saturated,” he explains. “It’s not made for the Rockies.”
The company’s design operations will be kept separate from Schumacher’s, in an effort to maintain the uniqueness that people love about Tillett. “We wanted to preserve this brand but also make sure that the prints didn’t just get absorbed into a catalog,” says Yumusaklar, adding that he and Ostbye have gotten to know D.D. and Leslie Tillett’s son, Seth, through the acquisition, and have learned a lot about the artistry that went into building the brand. “It’s a level of craftsmanship that’s very rare, and we feel strongly about keeping that alive.”
