About Mirth Studio

Owner and creator of Mirth Studio, Sally Bennett first found her way to flooring as a decorative painter, taking commissions to create back breaking, hand-painted floors. Sally built her career on the basis of a finely tuned craft and an entrepreneurial spirit, these qualities creating the opportunity to fill a hole in the flooring market with elegant, colorful and patterned hardwood floors. Initially drawn to the motifs of traditional cement and ceramic tiles, and inspired by the lack of diversity in hardwood, Sally created the early Mirth Studio designs: hand-painted patterns that were then digitally printed onto square oak tiles.

During the winter of 2020 Mirth took an important step towards the improvement of its raw material and manufacturing chain. Mirth partnered with one of the leaders in the hardwood flooring industry who produces eco-friendly, engineered, wide-plank hardwood. The move to planks has ushered in numerous additional benefits to Mirth's hardwood products. The planks make installation much easier and they create less waste to produce than their predecessors. Unchanged are the qualities that make Mirth's American-made hardwood unmatched: tongue and groove construction, a high quality industrial-grade top coat and beautiful designs.

As of 2021, Mirth has expanded to include product lines in porcelain, wallpaper, vinyl and hardwood planks. The combination of competitive pricing and designer focused patterns appeal to a broad range of style-conscious customers and budgets. Sally is always imagining new designs and painting them from her home in Charleston, SC, and given the growth Mirth has displayed in the past year (three brand new collections in porcelain, hardwood and wallpaper), it is exciting to imagine where the company will find itself in five years time.

The Start of Mirth

When Sally Bennett was renovating her home in Charleston, SC, she found that the type of floor she really wanted was not available in the marketplace. Sally wanted colorful floors with beautifully intricate patterns – like the ones she’d hand-painted her well-heeled clients as a decorative painter in New York. But her back would no longer allow her to spend hours in a prone position painting the floor like a reverse Michelangelo. Those days were over.

She thought about cement Moroccan tiles – they would give her the color and pattern she was after but they were too cold and hard for her living room. With practicality in mind (and a two year old) she decided wood tiles were much more “mommy friendly” than the cement versions which had inspired her. “Little heads get a much softer bump from wood than they do from tile,” she says.

She started researching and discovered there was nothing like this available in the marketplace. After months of hard work digging into the nitty gritty of the wood flooring industry (she never imagined that it would be her calling, but it suddenly seemed fascinating and glamorous), she finally hit on a manufacturing process that would produce wood tiles that were as durable as any wood floor, but with her own beautiful designs, just like she’d painted them.

The tongue-and-groove design also made the installation a breeze. It didn’t take long for Sally to realize she was sitting on something much bigger than her foyer floor.

With a portfolio of patterns in hand and a manufacturer solidified, Mirth Studio emerged right alongside her new home. “Nearly every floor in the house is a prototype,” she says.