Mariana Ertmann Builds Things That Last
The founder of Borne on antique combs, Colombian emeralds, and why the box matters as much as what's inside it.
Mariana Ertmann needed a sandalwood comb. Not any comb, but one that felt right in her hand, carved from real wood, weighted properly, something that carried a sense of permanence. She looked everywhere and found nothing that met the standard she had in her head. So, naturally, she went to her father-in-law’s garage.
She brought with her a photograph of an antique comb, the kind that felt like it belonged on a vanity table in another era, and determination. What followed was an afternoon of sawdust and trial and revision, a drill and a saw and two people figuring it out together, until the shape in the photograph started to exist in the world.
That is how Borne works. Not from a trend, not from a market gap, but from a specific, unmet need that Mariana decided to solve herself. Down to the last detail.
“The more passionate and nerdy and obsessive with the little details you can be,” she says, “the more you’re able to understand and then translate it in a way that people will notice.”
The tassel on The Silk Comb is hand-knotted silk, made by women in a region of Thailand with a generations-long practice of working with the material. Mariana found them through her seamstress in Houston, who found them through a family member, who passed along a phone number. The tassel is attached by Mariana herself, for every single order. The box it arrives in took six months to get right.
This is what the brand is.
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Mariana grew up in Bogotá, studied design there, and moved to Houston by way of family connections and an interior design internship that turned into a full-time position. She spent years learning the industry from the inside, putting energy into other people’s visions, growing increasingly aware that she had one of her own.
The city she landed in was not exactly a natural fit. “Houston can feel closed off,” she says, with the warmth of someone who has made her peace with it. “But there’s a lot of room for opportunity. If I weren’t in Houston when I started my creative journey, I probably wouldn’t have gotten here.”
What Houston gave her, unexpectedly, was space. Space to go to estate sales on weekends and develop a quiet obsession with antique objects. Space to start noticing the difference between a polyester shirt and a cotton one, and to understand why it mattered. Space to take trips to New York and discover that the fashion world she had always found intimidating was actually populated by interesting people, some of whom were genuinely worth knowing, and some of whom were not quite as formidable as their Instagram suggested.
“You can’t compare yourself to others based on social media or based on what you hear from others,” she says. “You just have to experience life for yourself.”
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Borne launched in January 2025 with a clear point of view: that objects should be chosen slowly, kept long, and mean something. Under it live two distinct worlds. The Edit is the vintage curation side, an evolving selection of antique pieces that Mariana sources, photographs, and presents with the care of someone who truly values what she is looking at. The Atelier is where her original designs live, objects imagined to age with you, to work their way into your daily rituals, to become the kind of thing you reach for without thinking.
The vintage funded the designs. The designs gave the vintage a context. The brand became a universe rather than a store.
Her eye was trained over years of antique hunting, estate sales, and a deepening love for the Art Deco period specifically. “Art Deco is that perfect transition,” she says, “that still honors craftsmanship and quality while making it functional and timeless.” It sits between the ancient and the modern in a way that mirrors her own sensibility: a design school background in modernism, an obsessive personal interest in what came before it.
Each piece in the Atelier has a provenance worth knowing. The Spira Cuff begins in the Andes: a Colombian emerald sourced in partnership with the Alliance for Responsible Mining, prototyped in a Parisian atelier, and finished in New York’s Diamond District, where Mariana discovered her production partners were Colombian. Full circle, she says. The Silk Comb, carved locally in Houston and finished with the silk tassel made by women in Thailand. Packaging that took six months to get right: custom boxes lined in black velvet, revised and revised again until they matched what she had always envisioned.
“I am so happy that I did not settle,” she says. “The devil is in the details. And I hope people will see that the minute they receive a Borne box.”
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New work is already forming. A collaboration with Christina Grasso, the New York tastemaker known as The Pouf, began with a shared fascination and arrived as a first prototype the morning of this conversation: a gold-plated lighter case pendant, tasseled, designed to be worn as jewelry or used to light candlesticks, the kind of object that is beautiful before it is anything else. Mariana held it up to the camera and the craftsmanship was immediately legible.
Longer term, Borne is moving toward a collection that pairs each wearable piece with a decorative object counterpart, and eventually toward furniture, perhaps the refurbishing of antique pieces. She has already been doing this for herself. Her couch, she mentions, was in very bad shape when she found it.
When asked what she would tell someone just starting out, Mariana skips past the expected answers and lands on something more useful: do your accounting from the beginning. Set up QuickBooks. Save every expense. Be frugal where you can, because you will want those resources later and you will not be able to predict when. “As creatives, we forget about that side of the business completely,” she says. “We’re focused on visuals.”
The other thing she would say, with equal conviction: be smart about who you build your life with. “You need a supportive husband,” she says, laughing, then catching herself. “Or don’t marry, and you have all the time for yourself.”
And underneath both of those, something quieter. Give your obsessions respect. Follow your curiosity into whatever corner it takes you. The sandalwood comb, the Colombian emerald, the silk tassel from Thailand: none of those details exist without a person who took her own instincts seriously enough to follow them all the way down.
Borne is still in its early days. Still being reinvested in, still finding its people, still becoming what it is going to be. Mariana knows this and is not in a hurry. She wakes up, walks her dog, reads Wuthering Heights. She dreams big and tries to stay present. She writes a handwritten note with every order, knowing that one day there will be too many to do that.
She is in no rush to get there. But she is getting there.
Thank you for being here,
Kelly