After selling her tech startup, Emma Harris did what any sensible founder would do next: She started a wallpaper company.
Two years after Miami-based hiring platform EarlyDay was acquired by Wonderschool, Harris has traded childcare tech for palm trees, patterns, and print shops. Her new venture, Marova Design, is a Miami-based wallpaper brand that might look far removed from her former life. Underneath, though, Harris is still thinking like a tech founder.
After the acquisition, Harris spent two years at Wonderschool, continuing to grow EarlyDay and working across other products. But she was also considering what she wanted her next chapter as an entrepreneur to look like.
“I really still truly love building a business from scratch. Figuring everything out, rolling up my sleeves and being involved in every aspect of the business,” Harris told Refresh Miami.
This time, she wanted to build something she could actually touch.
A longtime interiors fan, Harris began experimenting with wallpaper concepts using AI tools. She eventually landed on Gemini for creating renderings, then taught herself how to turn those concepts into repeatable, printable patterns and learned the ins and outs of an industry she described as “pretty old school.”
Friends started asking if they could buy her designs for their own homes. That was enough of a signal for Harris to give the idea a serious shot.
Today, Marova sells print-to-order wallpaper directly to consumers nationwide and works with interior designers on projects that can include custom colors and sizing. Harris creates the designs herself and works with a printer to produce and ship each order.
The business may be physical, but AI remains woven into how Harris runs it.
“I’ve tried to apply my tech founder brain to a lifestyle business,” she said. AI, she added, lets the company move faster and reach more people while leaving the physical product firmly intact. “It can only help.”
Some lessons from startup life require no artificial intelligence at all. Harris still obsesses over customer experience, personally answering questions and even creating renderings for potential buyers.
Those touches are “things that are not scalable, but that are the best way to really earn a customer’s trust,” she said.
Miami has already made its way onto the walls. One of Marova’s signature patterns features palm trees, Harris’ “ode to Miami,” which has landed in bathrooms, bedrooms and laundry rooms around South Florida. She sees plenty of room to grow among the region’s designers, creatives and expanding crop of high-end homes.
And the change has taken Harris somewhere tech rarely did: away from her screens. Instead of spending most of the day behind three monitors, she now meets interior designers for coffee, visits showrooms and gets out into Miami looking for ideas.
That has been especially welcome as Harris tackles another first: building a company without a co-founder.
Perhaps one day Marova will even show up during Miami Art Week. Harris certainly likes the thought.
“How cool would it be if, in a couple of years from now, my wallpaper designs are included in any of the art festivals or activities that are happening in Miami,” she said.
For a founder who spent her career building things that lived on screens, getting something onto Miami’s walls seems like a fitting second act.
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