A New York bedding and bath site launched in May 2018 by a fashion e-commerce executive.

Riley Home is a direct-to-consumer bedding and bath brand from New York. Its website went live on 1 May 2018, the trade paper Home Textiles Today reported that day, and its founder was Heather Kaminetsky, whom the paper described as a former senior executive at Net-a-Porter, the online fashion retailer. At launch she said Riley “was created not only to shake up the sleepy DTC bedding and bath category, but to offer customers a level of quality at a price they could only dream of.” She also framed it as a technology business: pairing the products with “a seamless, mobile-first technology platform,” she said, would create a place “to interact with customers, collect feedback, and adapt quickly to design relevant and desirable items.”

Kaminetsky came from fashion rather than textiles. TheIndustry.fashion, reporting in June 2025, said she had been vice president of global marketing at Net-a-Porter until 2016, joined Mytheresa in 2021 as president for North America, and had just been named chief executive of Net-a-Porter. By October 2019 she was no longer running Riley: Home Textiles Today reported then that she had left the company and that Sarah Abitbol headed it as chief executive.

The name is the brand’s main idea. The company’s About page says “Riley is a first name. A person’s name,” and points to the old expression “the life of Riley,” meaning a charmed, easy life; the brand says it named itself accordingly. Its lines play on that phrase and on bedtime: “Live the life of Riley,” and a trademarked sign-off, “Sleep with Riley.” The same page says the bedding business “takes itself too seriously and doesn’t take its customers seriously enough,” a tone of light innuendo that runs through its copy.

Portuguese mills at launch, and a wider list of makers today.

Where Riley’s products are made has been part of its pitch from the beginning. The launch announcement, as reported by Home Textiles Today in May 2018, said the products were made in Europe; the website described the bedding as “real Portuguese quality” and the bath range as “crafted in Portugal.”

Later coverage repeated the Portuguese link. In November 2018, launching a children’s line called Riley Jr., Kaminetsky spoke of the brand’s “exclusive Portuguese textile mills,” and the paper said the line was for the most part produced in the brand’s fourth-generation, family-owned mills across Europe, like the core range. In April 2019 it reported that the Riley Jr. bath line was made at a fourth-generation partner mill in Portugal, in cotton.

The company’s current wording is broader. Its About page says Riley has “exclusive partnerships with Portugal’s finest textile mills as well as global and US-based manufacturers,” and describes “fourth generation family-owned textile mills in Europe.” It says that by cutting out the middlemen it can sell at what it calls attainable prices.

The launch range, according to the May 2018 report, covered percale and sateen sheets, duvet covers, down and down-alternative bedding, two kinds of bath towel, a bath rug, a bath mat and robes. A “Lie-On” programme sent shoppers swatches of percale and sateen, and most pieces could be monogrammed. Pet beds followed in August 2018 and Riley Jr. in November, with printed sateen duvet covers, crib sheets and muslin blankets; a bath component with a poncho, hooded towels and bathrobes was announced to follow in time for the holiday season.

Design and documentation.

Direct-to-consumer bedding brands sell sheets, duvets, pillows and towels mainly through their own websites rather than through department stores, and they usually build their identity there: in the name, the photography, the colour names given to each shade and the tone of the copy. Many are young companies, and some have since been sold, merged into larger groups, moved into physical stores or closed, so the brand a shopper sees today may sit with a different owner from the one that launched it.

Bedding is also a category where the place of making is easy to blur. A brand can be designed in one country while its fabric is woven, finished and sewn in others, and the wording on a website does not always say which step happened where. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started the brand, who owns it now, and which mills or factories make its products.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time and where its textiles are made — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a website to a shop inside Bloomingdale’s.

Riley began as a website and moved into other retailers’ stores about a year after launch. In April 2019 Home Textiles Today reported that the Riley Jr. bath range, with children’s robes, towels and terry ponchos, had gone live on Maisonette, the children’s apparel and home site; Sogole Kane, Riley’s head of marketing and public relations, said Maisonette was the brand’s only retail partner at that point, chosen because its shoppers were, in her words, “Riley shoppers.”

In October 2019 Bloomingdale’s agreed to carry the collection online and in selected stores, including its flagship on 59th Street in Manhattan, which gained its own Riley shop. HFN, reporting the deal on 17 October 2019, called Riley a “millennial soft home and lifestyle brand” and listed bedding, bath, comforters, pillows, dog beds and Riley Jr. in the assortment, with percale, sateen, linen and flannel sheets and two towel ranges, Spa and Plush. In that report the name was styled RiLEY, with a lower-case i. Abitbol said that launching retail was “an incredibly important milestone for a direct-to-consumer brand like ours.”

Today the website names itself Riley Home and sorts its bedding into collections including Percale, Sateen, Linen and Organic Cotton. It also runs a charitable programme called Blanket the City; Mattress Clarity’s launch report described it as donating a blanket to a homeless shelter with qualifying purchases, and the brand’s current page describes support for people facing housing or hardship challenges.

For a design guide, Riley Home shows how a bedding brand can build its whole voice around a borrowed phrase and a person’s first name. Compare Brooklinen, another New York direct-to-consumer sheet brand, and Parachute. For this guide we use midnight blue, blush and linen with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Riley Home’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.