When Wilet closed its acquisition in December of last year, CEO and co-founder Vivian McCormick knew what would follow: congratulations, assumptions, tidy narratives.

“When you see an acquisition too, right?” she says. “Everybody just goes to this like, ‘Oh, you must be a millionaire now.’”

What interests her more isn’t the deal itself. It’s the years that led to it—the early scrappiness, the forced rebrand, the capital tradeoffs, and what she calls “the middle part.”

“That middle part,” she says, “is like the fucking hardest part.”

Wilet began in 2018 under a different name—Flax Sleep—after one of the founders wanted linen bedding and couldn’t find what she was looking for.

“We just wanted one set of linen bedding,” McCormick says. “And then we figured we’d get a bunch more for everybody else too.”

The founders—McCormick, Anna Heyd, and Oana Papuc—self-funded the business and supplemented it with small loans from Women’s Enterprise Centre and Futurepreneur. They were profitable early. They leaned on debt rather than equity, in part because McCormick’s background in banking law made that route feel navigable.

Looking back, she sees both the benefit and the constraint.

“When things are good, nobody blinks,” she says. “And when things get tougher, that’s when debt gets a little bit more constraining than investors.”

The pandemic created a surge few could have predicted. Consumers stuck at home redirected spending inward. Bedding became aspirational. Wilet experienced rapid growth. Inventory flew. Expansion into the U.S. felt plausible.

Then the market shifted.

Between 2022 and 2024, the Canadian luxury segment softened. Inventory decisions made during the boom lingered. The brand wasn’t failing—but it wasn’t scaling at the pace the founders had once imagined either.

“We were kind of stuck in the middle,” McCormick says.

Too small to pivot quickly. Too large to reset lightly.

“That middle part,” she repeats, “is the hardest part.”

The U.S. expansion effort triggered an unexpected challenge: a trademark dispute over the word “flax.” Fighting it would have meant years of litigation and a seven-figure legal bill.

“It was faster and cheaper for us to just rethink this brand,” she says.

The rebrand—first from Flax Sleep to Flax Home, and eventually to Wilet—came with real consequences. SEO dropped sharply. Traffic fell. Momentum slowed. But it also forced a deeper question.

“When we decided to rebrand, we said, ‘How do we make sure that this is a legacy brand we’re building?’”

They wanted a name that wouldn’t tether the company to a single material or limit future growth. The setback became a strategic reset.

Wilet’s three-founder structure wasn’t accidental. Early on, they wrote what McCormick calls “founder vows,” outlining boundaries and decision-making principles.

“We always had a tiebreaker,” she says. “And funny enough, it was always switching.”

The company was owned evenly. It wasn’t always simple—but it worked for them.

Letting go, collectively, was emotional.

“We’re never going to own this thing again together,” she says. “Maybe something else. But yeah.”

By the time the acquisition closed, the decision had been brewing. Wilet had explored conversations with other retailers before. Some fizzled. Some were exciting and then disappointing.

When discussions with QE Home began, the alignment came quickly.

“We had ideas,” McCormick says. “But we do need more resources. And that doesn’t necessarily just mean capital.”

It meant supply chain depth. Designers with fabric expertise. Distribution that would have taken years to build independently.

The deal, in her view, wasn’t about walking away. It was about unlocking the next phase responsibly.

If there’s one thing McCormick returns to repeatedly, it’s how her relationship to growth has changed.

At the height of the DTC boom, scaling fast felt like the only acceptable path. Lifestyle businesses felt like compromise.

“I think I was very averse to that idea,” she says. “And I think I was also very naive.”

Now, she asks different questions.

“Why do you want to grow?” she says. “Is that the right thing to do?”

She’s also increasingly intrigued by acquisition entrepreneurship—buying and optimizing existing businesses rather than starting from scratch.

But what she’s most interested in talking about is the part most founders gloss over.

“I think it’s important,” she says, “because so much of the LinkedIn world is all the gloss and all the fun.”

The part she wants to surface is the uncomfortable stretch in between—the recalibrations, the financial stress, the identity questions.

“That middle part,” she says again, “is the hardest part.”

And for her, that’s where the real learning happened.