New York–based direct-to-consumer drapery brand Wovn Home has been acquired by brother-sister duo John and Maria Mihalios. The pair also own Master Craftsman Decorators, a family-run upholstery, drapery and woodworking studio in Long Island City. The deal was finalized June 11 and the price was not disclosed.

Davina OgilvieBrittany Ambridge

Founded by Davina Ogilvie in 2019, Wovn Home built a following of both designers and homeowners by providing an e-commerce spin on custom window treatments. Ogilvie, who prior to starting the business had worked in merchandising and buying for J.Crew, among other brands, had an experience that many DTC founders share: trying to source a product for a personal project, in this case window treatments for her family’s Brooklyn apartment, and being disappointed with what was on the market and how difficult the custom route seemed to be.

Growing up in Bangkok, Ogilvie says that while custom drapery wasn’t inexpensive, it was more common and accessible than in the U.S. “Living in New York, I realized, ‘Oh, this is a cumbersome process here,’” she says. “Window treatments can make such a difference in a room, and I think it can be overlooked when people are designing their homes. I wanted to simplify it for retail customers.” While the brand has maintained a steady faction of retail customers, it has been heartily embraced by the design trade, which now makes up the bulk of its customers.

Ogilvie was working on Wovn on the side while maintaining her day job until the pandemic-induced home boom convinced her that the concept had legs and needed her full focus. She began the company by working with a few small workrooms in New York, but expanded the network to include studios across the country, with the majority of orders now manufactured at a large workroom in North Carolina. Moving forward, operations will continue uninterrupted, with certain to-the-trade orders potentially to be fulfilled at the MCD studio.

Shortly after starting Wovn six years ago, Ogilvie met John Mihalios when they were both installing different elements on a New York designer’s project. “What could have been an awkward or competitive interaction almost immediately turned into John and I trying to figure out how we could work together,” she says. “There was a mutual respect for what we’d both built from the start.”

Those conversations continued over the years, with the two companies occasionally completing one-off collaborative projects like custom upholstery orders. Eventually, Mihalios mentioned that he and his sister Maria would be interested in acquiring Wovn Home should Ogilvie ever be interested in selling. It turned out that she was.

As Wovn grew under Ogilvie’s stewardship, so did the scope of customer demands, with designers in particular wanting to source not just drapery, but also custom upholstery, pillows and more. “We’ve had a lot of off-menu services like motorized shades and bed skirts that we’ve accommodated,” she says. While she was able to facilitate the occasional bespoke order, taking the brand into new categories would have required finding new manufacturers and acquiring knowledge of entirely different product categories. “John saw how much of an opportunity there is to add these other categories in a way that’s commercially available,” she adds. “He has the operational and manufacturing capacities to expand in ways that feel natural to the brand, but that we weren’t set up to do on our own.”

Though he does have plans to scale Wovn, Mihalios isn’t in a rush to expand too quickly and recognizes that the possibilities for custom orders are inherently limited within a retail e-commerce operation. “The logistics of selling fully custom pieces online are hard to crack,” he says. “It’s not like a major company that can offer competitive shipping pricing—we’re still a small company. So, I don’t foresee offering products like custom upholstery to retail customers until next year at the earliest; and even then, it might be semi-custom, where a few silhouettes are offered and you can choose your fabrics. If we’re going to roll something new out, we want there to be no hiccups.” He also points out that retail customers aren’t used to the eight-to-12-week lead times that custom upholstery can require. “To the trade, that’s nothing, but in the e-commerce world, that’s a long time,” he explains, adding that the semi-custom route would reduce that timeline.

Mihalios has retained all of Wovn’s staff, and he intends to keep the two companies operating largely as separate entities, with the caveat that MCD could provide premium options, like fully hand-sewn draperies, to Wovn’s trade clients. Ogilvie plans to stay on for at least the next two years, overseeing the transition for both employees and customers. “It’s exciting to see where John takes the business, but also to still be along for the ride,” she says. “John is an industry veteran and I just started in this space five years ago, but I feel like we’re kindred spirits. What is great for clients is that they’ll get the same quality and personalized service that they’re used to with Wovn Home with even deeper industry knowledge by working with him and his team.”