By Julia Gamolina

Jeremy Bilotti and David Rosenwasser are the founders of Rarify, a designer-founded company specializing in collectible vintage and contemporary furniture. Combining backgrounds in architecture and technology, they bring a refined, research-based approach to both sourcing and storytelling. Rarify procures furniture at scale for businesses, building projects and design offices, and also makes their collection available to individual collectors and consumers at a range of price points. Education and authenticity play enormous roles in the company, with their free educational video content highlighting Rarify's in-house collection of 20,000+ items.

JG: I feel incredibly lucky to have met you both in the early days of Rarify, and to have seen its meteoric evolution since. Just this years alone, you opened your showroom, designed your first product, and continue to produce thoughtful content. What do you attribute your success to? What do you think about the brand resonates most with your audience and customers?

DR: When we started Rarify back in January of 2021, we were looking to create a business that was built around a community of design enthusiasts and to build excitement about the historic and emerging works of design that we loved so dearly. We used Instagram as a testing ground to do so. After a number of months and failed attempts, it turned out that people simply loved hearing about the nerdy history of these iconic works, and that our videos resonate because we are designers ourselves who are passionate about what we do.

With our audience largely based in the US and biased 25-45 age-wise, we try to communicate with simple language — we’re two kids from central NJ and central PA after all — instead of gatekeeping. We also try to build our collection with attention to folks who have less budget to work with so that our community can feel that they can engage as consumers as well. To some degree, our success has come thanks to the people who watch our videos and the smaller group who occasionally support us with a lamp or a chair purchase, both of which we’re hugely grateful for.

JB: We hear from our customers, clients and followers that we are making design more accessible by explaining the background and technicalities that are typically not shared. From our own experience in design education, we recognize that there are many barriers to entry when it comes to engaging with design. Design degrees are particularly expensive, and many design professions lack the promise of adequate wages proportionate to the skill and commitment they require.

By building our business to be not only a source for products, but also for information, we are providing some form of design education for free. On an even higher level, the issue of circularity in furniture goods is also really importance to us. By teaching about design, materials, manufacturing and all of the complex facets that contribute to longevity in physical goods — or lack thereof — we are trying to make an appreciable, positive impact on our unfortunately misguided culture of consumption and waste here in the US.

David, how did your interest in collecting develop?

DR: The earliest foundations of Rarify start as a high school student in Hershey, PA. I became obsessed with the Eames lounge chair and ottoman as a twelve-year-old. Working minimum-wage jobs to save up some cash and looking at little Taschen books or Dwell magazines that I accumulated, this fueled an interest in 20th-century architecture and the the designers who often innovated in furniture design alongside their architectural works.

Once I got my driver’s license, I would go around Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and New York picking up the coolest vintage pieces I could buy cheap and restore if necessary. I’d buy a piece or two, restore them — learning about restoration along the way — and list them on eBay to try and make a profit. This was all in an effort to amass a collection of iconic architect-designed furniture before I started architecture school.

Local architects would wisely tell me that architecture wasn’t a great career financially and that they didn’t have money for fancy furniture, so I figured I’d get it all before I was a poor architect. By the end of high school, a gentleman in the Philippines had bought an Eames lounge from me and after getting it, told me that he wanted to fill up a 40-foot container to open up a vintage furniture store in Manilla. He proceeded to buy me out of virtually everything I had collected and wire transferred $120,000 over the course of my summer before college. I fiercely restored all of the pieces that needed work before fall and those funds became the seed capital for D ROSE MOD, the vintage business that preceded Rarify. The intent was never originally to have a business, but instead find a way to afford the special pieces I loved. Rarify has evolved from that vintage business.

Jeremy, what about you in terms of fabrication?

JB: A painting teacher of mine as a kid introduced me to the work of Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Oscar Niemeyer and others, including some of their most influential works of furniture design. Later, through developing both a friendship and working relationship with David, I was exposed to the vast history of design, industry and manufacturing, particularly from the 20th century onward. Research in fabrication and design technology then became a natural career path as I developed experiences in the design industry; I was able to study precedents for the conception, design and manufacture of groundbreaking products and technologies, and use those historical precedents to create new innovations while at research labs and design firms.

“We recognize that there are many barriers to entry when it comes to engaging with design...by building our business to be not only a source for products, but also for information, we are providing some form of design education for free.”

— Jeremy Bilotti

We also all graduated from Cornell AAP — what were your biggest takeaways and lessons from your time there?

DR: While in the architecture program, we both spent years working in research labs on 3D printing novel materials and robotic fabrication. Our most important takeaways from school are around the value of rigorous research and also learned about the fundamental value of education. We were lucky enough to have mentors like Jenny Sabin, who taught us about ethics in academia, the value of mentorship, and how to consider the field of design as scientists or technologists.

How did Rarify, and the partnership between you two, come about?

DR: Jeremy and I both met as first-year classmates in the B.Arch program at Cornell, where I was quickly scared shitless of my brilliant group of colleagues. It was clear early on that Jeremy was a special kind of “brilliant” with both a creative and technical skillset that was simultaneously remarkable and intimidating, especially in a competitive program. As the years followed, we were fast friends, but also worked together on projects in our architectural and as researchers in academic labs such as the Sabin Lab led by Jenny Sabin. Once our thesis time came around, we stubbornly pursued a joint-thesis, where we learned the beauty of collaboration and complementary skillsets.

We continued on to graduate school afterward. Jeremy pursued a dual-degree student in Design Computation and Computer Science at MIT, while I was an M.Des Tech student at Harvard. The time in graduate school was a conscious effort to find a way to start a business together and use graduate school as a time to learn and experiment in order to do so. With mentorship from industrial designer Stephen Burks and another joint-thesis, we launched Rarify in 2021 and started working on it full time right after we graduated.

Rarify Showroom in Philadelphia. Courtesy of Rarify.

What was the best advice you got early on that has informed your approach to your careers and to Rarify?

DR: John Edelman said something like, “This business has terrible margins. Don’t go into it thinking you’re going to get rich”

JB: Stephen Burks said something like, “Why are you both spinning your wheels looking for a crazy robotic fabrication business to start together? You have this amazing vintage furniture business. Use it as a stepping stone to do what you really want to do instead of starting from zero.”

Who are some of your early and current mentors?

DR: Jenny Sabin was and is an incredible mentor. In an academic world that can be competitive and cutthroat, she taught us instead how to treat people well in academia. She put great care into teaching us about the fundamentals of research, about the importance of credit to contributors and collaborators, and about the value of cross-disciplinary work with great partners. She showed us how innovation can happen collaboratively and how communities come together to share that knowledge.

JB: Jenny taught us by example that we would be most likely to succeed when we remember to always remain curious, have persistence, work respectfully and humbly with collaborators, and maintain an unwavering commitment to integrity.

“Learn how to be and stay stubborn about your ambitions...Agency is crucial in running a business or building a career in the way that you want to.”

— David Rosenwasser

Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you both manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?

DR: Trying to find a way to run a mission-driver business that also allows us to feed ourselves has been an enormous challenge. For our first two to three years, we had our heads down building our website, our social media account, establishing relationships with suppliers, developing a marketing strategy, and all of the components needed to run a business in this day and age. We weren’t even close to making enough money to pay one of us a livable salary and that was painful.

We are very lucky to have enormous trust in one another and a commitment to see this project through. We decided early on that we didn’t want to take outside investment, which made the early years and still our operations today all the more challenging. We do, however, want to make sure that as this business grows, we can continue to push the company in the creative directions that we feel is right without being constrained by a need for investor returns.

JB: Remaining independent through the challenges of building a business is now proving to be an important factor in how we differentiate ourselves. We see a tremendous amount of corporate consolidation in the US furniture industry. The result of large, publicly-traded or "grandfathered-in" sources of FF&E is more waste, a decrease in the quality of products and less involvement of designers in decision making when it comes to furniture in building projects. Right now, we are able to have full control of our partnerships, suppliers and ways of working, though this is not always the easy path.

What have you learned in the last six months?

DR: We learned that we can launch our own Rarify-designed lamp without going broke! The launch of Cube-One was a huge milestone for us, as we have always built Rarify with a goal of being able to one day have our own brand that produces in-house designed works and those designed in collaboration with others who we admire. Thanks to an opportunity from Gantri, we were able to design and launch that product far sooner than we had imagined and realized that we can continue to slowly develop new products in the coming months and years.

JB: We've also learned about the great impact that press publications can have for our operation. When we're lucky enough to be recognized for our work, it makes a massive impact in web traffic and inquiries to our business. As a result this year, we've been able to have a more positive impact for clients by expanding our selection of suppliers, create more free video content for our community, and support the incremental growth of our company.

Rarify window display at Bergdorf Goodman, 2025. Courtesy of Rarify.

Who are you admiring now and why?

DR: Zieta and MOOOI are two brands who we have deep admiration for, as both companies are experimental at their cores. Academics and researchers like Behnaz Farahi, Skylar Tibbits, and Jenny Sabin are examples of designers who continue to use innovation in research as fuel for new work that is meaningful in its contribution forward. Then we have folks like Jaye Buchbinder and the team at Emeco who are producing high quality furniture in the US, while meticulously thinking about responsible material use, treating employees well, and how to consider evolution not revolution in their work.

What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission? And, what does success in that look like to you?

DR: We want Rarify to be a company that stands for authenticity, education, innovation, and meaningful design discourse. When I look back at what was so special about American modern design in furniture, I think to Florence Knoll, who created an extraordinary business that enabled talented designers to experiment and build careers for themselves using Florence’s business acumen and Knoll as a platform. When I look to the work of Ray and Charles Eames, I see two designers who identified unique innovations of a specific period in time and adapted those to affordable furniture pieces that responded to the materials and techniques made possible by post-war manufacturing methods. We want Rarify to develop new work alongside the innovators and emerging talents of today in a similar but contemporary manner to these companies in the 1940s and 1950s.

Outside of this company-focused ambition, Jeremy and I will always care deeply about education and contributing work that is accessible rather than gate-kept. I hope we can find a way to continue engaging different audiences through education, whether that is through teaching, mentoring within our own team, or our online and local communities. If we can make that happen, I’d call Rarify a success!

JB: At a broader scale, success will also be defined for us by our impact on the building industry. It's often unrecognized how large of an impact furniture has on the amount of waste that is landfilled each year, much of which is coming from architecture and building projects that are renovated and refreshed at an increasing frequency. When we are able to make an appreciable impact on reducing waste by increasing the longevity of furniture specifications and integrating re-used and restored furniture as a common practice, this will be incredibly meaningful to us. The potential scale of this impact is very large.

Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? For young entrepreneurs?

DR: Learn how to be and stay stubborn about your ambitions. We had and still have countless companies telling us about why they can’t or won’t work with us, but we don’t let that bother us and instead use that as fuel to keep pushing. Agency is crucial in running a business or building a career in the way that you want to.

For those aspiring designers or businesspeople, don’t count on any glory like getting rich or getting famous. It’s a waste of energy. Think instead about how you can try to balance doing what you love while also considering how you can do it responsibly. For all of the fun parts of running our business, we spend ninety percent of our time working on things like building product data, answering technical emails and working on taxes. We built Rarify with the idea that in the first years, we would try and find a way to create a business that would hopefully sustain itself financially, and if we succeeded in that — whether in five years or twenty years — then we could expand into more creative or fulfilling but risky avenues.

Lastly, talk to the people who you admire and try your best to find great mentors. If you can show others how driven and passionate you are about a shared topic, others are often then generous and willing to share their experience.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Authenticity, Education, and Innovation: Rarify's Jeremy Bilotti and David Rosenwasser on Meaningful Design Discourse, Impact at Scale, and the Beauty of Collaboration