From social media stardom to vintage resale, Rarify's founders are building a new kind of design brand

0:03This is Business of Home. I'm your host, Dennis Scully. Every week I'll be speaking with leaders and innovators from all corners of the home industry. My guests this week are Jeremy Bellotti and David Rosenwasser, the co-founders of Rarify. Jeremy and David met at Cornell's architecture school and bonded instantly over their shared love of modernist design. Over the past 10 years, they've built Rarify into a unique and multifaceted company, one that combines vintage resale, e-commerce, a contract furniture dealership, and a retail store in Philadelphia. Not to mention a popular Instagram account that draws millions of views for its deep dives into the past, present, and future of great furniture.

0:53I spoke with Jeremy and David about how a$120 ,000 sale to a collector in the Philippines gave them the seed money to get started, why they're looking to break up what they call the commercial furniture mafia, and why their ultimate ambition is to take what Knoll was in 1948 and remake it for the modern day.

1:21This podcast is sponsored by Leloy. For over 20 years, Leloy has been a leader in the home textile industry by upholding the highest standards in craftsmanship and customer service. See the newest collections of Lolloy Rugs, Pillows, and Wall Art at Vegas Market this summer from July 27th through the 31st. Showroom appointments are highly recommended, and you can make yours today at lolloyrugs.com. That's L-O-L-O-Y rugs.com. And don't forget to follow at Lolloy Rugs on Instagram and TikTok. And now, on with the show. Jeremy, before we jump into the conversation, I wonder if you would be so kind as to tell us a little bit about what Rarify is today, the multifaceted operation that it is.

2:14Explain it to us. Sure. And thank you so much for having us, Dennis. Rarefy is an independent designer-led source for unique and rare furniture. Originally, it started over 15 years ago as a collection of vintage furniture and has grown to represent and source from over 100 of the most coveted manufacturers in the world. So 15 years ago, which means that the two of you were actually pretty young when this operation got going. Yes, David, my crack research assistant, also known as the lovely Mrs. Scully, came running down the stairs while she was in the midst of researching with a photograph of you and your dad looking out the back of a vintage Porsche.

2:59I guess your dad was restoring this car, perhaps with your assistance. You looked to be wearing some goggles at the time and doing some work there. Tell me about that scene, and I have a sense it was part of how this whole operation got going. Yeah, I think your senses are right, and your research team seems to be very thorough. So, yeah, I grew up in Hershey, Pennsylvania, which is home to the largest antique auto show, I think, in the U.S. or the world. And, yeah, I grew up in basically what was a suburban house in a rural-ish area with a hospital nearby, and had sort of no reason to be interested in architecture of modern design, but grew up around a lot of making and a lot of craft.

3:42So my dad always was interested in woodworking and fine tools and watchmaking and woodturning and also car restoration. And as I was a little kid, I was never that interested in sort of the metalwork and the welding of auto restoration, but I was really interested in sort of finer and smaller scale stuff. So woodworking was more so my interest. When I was about 12, my mom had gifted my dad an Eames lounge chair in Ottomans, so the classic Eames lounge in Ottomans. And that sort of landed in our house like this kind of alien. And that in and of itself got me hooked on, yes, the work of Charles and Ray Eames, but also then what is this stuff and what is a part of?

4:26And so then that then spurred an interest in architecture through learning about the furniture. And as a hyper obsessed, weird teenager, I thought that the most natural thing to do was I couldn't own the buildings or touch the buildings that often that were coveted, but I could definitely try and work a minimum wage job and save up and find the cheapest, crappiest examples of important works of design, which sort of meant, I want an Eames chair, how do I get an Eames chair? And so the first piece of furniture that was mine was an Eames LCW that was ordered new from Herman Miller in Walnut that we actually had here in the basement in our showroom.

5:10And shortly thereafter, I realized, oh, actually, I'd like to work on this stuff. So very quickly you would get familiar with Craigslist and eBay and be buying things really just to hoard and learn and amass a collection of stuff that turned out by accident to become a business. Well, that was the thing. You actually amassed quite a substantial collection from a young age, yes? Yeah, what was pretty nuts is that I was a free intern at this architecture office in Lebanon, PA. And that architect, who is fantastic, Kit Kelly, gave me the option to just hoard and store stuff in the vacant offices of his office building, as long as he didn't have a tenant.

5:55And he never had a tenant, so I had all these offices that I could fill up. And what that meant was that as this interest developed and as it became time to apply to architecture school, one thing happened which was fantastic and unimaginable, which was getting into Cornell School of Architecture where I met Jeremy. But the other thing that happened was I had this habit now of affording to buy more furniture by selling off pieces one at a time. So I would buy two Eames Aluminum Group chairs from the 1970s, and I would sell one of them, and I would make enough money that I could go and buy another piece of furniture.

6:32And this was just to amass a bigger collection, because architects kept telling me that architects didn't make enough money to have all of this great stuff. And so I thought, okay, well, I'll get all of it ahead of time. If you pursue architecture, you'll never make enough money to have all of this. It was good advice. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so by senior year of high school, just got into Cornell, this gentleman in the Philippines reached out. He had bought an Eames lounge chair in Ottoman and he said, hey David, I really like this. I was wondering if you could fill up a shipping container because I want to open a vintage furniture store in the Philippines.

7:05And so at the age of 18, he wire transferred me over that summer$120 ,000. Unbelievable. With a Word document that I had put together that said, here's a George Nelson cabinet. It's going to need full restoration. It's$2 ,500, but it will be fully restored. And the only photo he saw was a junkie one of it pre-restoration. He just sort of blindly trusted. The banker in Hershey, Pennsylvania had to check with my mom about what all these wire transfers were. Yes. You could see some eyebrows being raised, right? Yeah. Yeah. I was dealing stuff, but it was just furniture. And then what that meant was at this very young age, I would soon go and meet brilliant Jeremy at Cornell's amazing School of Architecture.

7:50And also, there was this sort of seed funding that allowed a vintage business to sort of start and get off the ground at a kind of bizarrely young age, thanks to this gentleman in the Philippines. So as you say, off you go to Cornell, where you meet Jeremy, who also has developed an interest in this area, Jeremy. So tell us how you come by a fascination with all of this. So I grew up as the kid who spent all his afternoons all summer long drawing and painting and making little things and folding origami. Anything I could figure out how to do that had anything to do with art, I was trying to do.

8:32And eventually I took painting and drawing classes just locally with a family friend who was an artist. And her home was kind of this modernist oasis in the middle of this kind of suburban New Jersey landscape. I hadn't seen anything like what I saw in her house. You know, there was a Vasily chair and there were beautiful paintings that she had done. I kind of became obsessed with not only art, but then also these sort of modernist icons of design. And so David and I immediately clicked when we first met each other. We were fast friends, and we went through architecture school together during a period of time where architects were quickly gaining access to robust software and digital tools and manufacturing technologies that had become accessible to them.

9:32And so we were kind of living this dual design life where during the day we were learning about the history of architecture in the 20th century. And then after class, we were working jobs in research labs and learning how to use and program robotic arms. It just so happens that all of these digital and manufacturing tools are also some of the same tools that are used to manufacture furniture and kind of interesting and high design products that we now work with all the time. So we sort of both during this period of time developed a deep fascination for all these technologies and at the same time an appreciation for design history.

10:17And it seems during this time that neither of you felt strongly about pursuing architecture or wanting to continue on in the field, David. I mean, tell me, help me understand that a little better. Yeah, I think what was interesting to us is that we both, as maybe fourth and fifth year students in the architecture school, had become really interested in the research arm of design and architecture schools. We were involved in a research lab led by Jenny Sabin, who is an incredible designer and researcher based at Cornell. And so we learned to be very, very skilled researchers and also how to build these really interesting tools.

11:01Jeremy more so on how to build interesting computational models. And I think we were getting more and more hooked about maybe becoming academics. because I think within the field of architecture, we saw it as a field that students and young designers were often sort of like getting taken advantage of, right? The pay is pretty poor given the quality of education that's required in most cases. And I think moreover also, we were just getting very excited about working together because we realized that we complemented each other's talents in a very meaningful way. And so we wrapped up at Cornell and we sort of realized two things.

11:43One was that we were on this research track that might allow us to go to these really incredible graduate schools. And also that maybe we wanted to start a business together. And boy, oh boy, if we could get into, for instance, Harvard at MIT, that would be a really amazing place to maybe take some entrepreneurship courses and use that as a sort of ground to experimented to figure out what we would do as a launching pad afterward. The business went through a whole bunch of iterations. At one point, Rarify was a robotic ceramics fabrication company. Because of course. Yeah, that would have been an interesting path to go down.

12:22And we were very excited about it for a period of time. Rarify was a whole bunch of things, and we were kind of floating around about what it should be. We were taking an independent study course with Stephen Burks, who was a Loeb fellow at Harvard. Former guest on the show. Sure. Big fan. Yes. Stephen, great person, great designer. And he became a really influential mentor of us both during that period. And I remember we were sitting in a coffee shop with him at one point, having a meeting, going over all of our ideas, which there are always too many of them. So Stephen and was always trying to help us pare them down.

13:01And at one point, I think he stopped us and he said, guys, you have all these interests in design and technology. You have this existing amazing collection of vintage furniture and this fascination and experience with furniture design. Why not kind of combine those two things and use the furniture as a sort of foundation to build this business? So the idea for Rarify sort of became a digital gallery. That was the kind of original concept. So the medium would be furniture design, and then the context and the way it's presented is that it would be a gallery that exists in digital space, right? We were sort of anti-showroom, and now we have a showroom in Philadelphia.

13:48Yeah. But at the time, we didn't want one. Turns out the industry really wanted you to have a showroom, I feel like. It turns out the industry wanted us to have a showroom. But at the time, we sort of had this idea that it was going to be sort of a digital-born practice, which it still is, and it still has that DNA. And what was the digital gallery going to be all about, and how did that fit in with everything else that you wanted to do, David? Part of this was that we were in these very technology-focused programs, right? So we're trying to think of this through the most ambitious, technology-focused way we could.

14:23And so Jeremy had done a... We ended up doing joint theses both for undergraduate and for graduate school, but where Rarify was inherently tied to both of these thesis projects. And on my end, it was focused on 3D scanning and looking at that Mason technology as something that could adapt and translate to a vintage dealer having a gallery that was sort of unprecedented presented using 3D scanning to show the depth and high resolution of a Nakashima desk that we had, for instance, and that you could visualize these things online in a very cutting-edge way. And on Jeremy's side, it was looking at AI and how you could use surveys and models and information about design and furniture to create something very compelling and learn about these pieces or maybe the market for them through that.

15:13It's sort of reductive. But I think what we learned more so and what we were strategic about too is forming connections with some really phenomenal people while we were in graduate school. So that's how we connected to John Edelman, who's become a mentor of ours, as well as the Buckbinders who own Emico. And many of those mentors are still kind of close friends and colleagues as far as today. But I think in part, being students at Harvard and MIT really helped us to shove our way into the door of this, what I think is a quite gatekept community or field, where we were trying to break in to become dealers of a lot of these different manufacturers who are sort of legacy companies as a means of taking the vintage business, taking a step forward and saying, we want to engage with designers, architects, and beyond in the contemporary context.

16:09And through doing that, we can't only be providing vintage. We also need to be dealers of these companies to be working at scale on large projects. And we have greater ambitions, but I think we wanted to take a step aside and maybe put our ego aside a little bit and say, okay, we want to build a sustainable business first before we do something more grandiose, because we don't want to take on investment. We want to run this company the way we want in perpetuity. And you had this seed money from the Philippines wire transfer, right? Back in the, with the container full of, okay. And so the idea was that was at least going to be your, your starting working capital for, for what this business was, was going to become.

16:55And the, and the vintage was still a sizable inventory you, you had. And, but you also realized that in order to get past the gatekeepers, to your point, that you really needed to become dealers, which turns out not to be so easy to do. Yeah, exactly. I think what we used to help us, in addition to being students at these prestigious schools, was that we had this large and quite impressive vintage collection to rely on, right? And that$120 ,000 of seed capital had, at that point, six to eight years now to spin and get reinvested, sell more chairs, buy more chairs. And so this was already thousands of pieces of furniture, not nearly as much as what we have today, but was maybe 10, 15, 20 ,000 square feet of warehouse space, where now we have 80 ,000 square feet of warehouse space.

17:48And our age was definitely something that was a hindrance. We were, I don't know, 26 or something like that at the time, trying to talk to Cassina and Poltrona Frau and all of these brands that run in an antiquated sort of model of the showroom and all of this. And we were trying to push as hard as we could, even though there was resistance to both our age and the way we were running a business model and the lack of showroom. And so we built a small, well, we built a 10 ,000 square foot showroom in Lebanon, PA, which visually looked great, but did not pass the test for some brands. It was satisfactory for others.

18:29And yeah, we kept coming across these hurdles of why we couldn't become dealers of brand A or B. But eventually you got there, yes? I will say, yes, we did get there. And now we work with over 100 manufacturers. And I think what got us there initially and has continued to was just a genuine expression of our passion for design. For example, Emiko was one of the very first companies that we worked with. And so we sort of learned from that. And sooner or later, one at a time, each of these manufacturers that we revered and had known so well for many, many years because we had seen all of the product as vintage furniture started to come around and kind of agree to work with us.

19:23And the goal ultimately was to be able to work with our colleagues and friends and others in the community on larger projects, building projects, development projects, in order to kind of bring better design to a larger scale. Well, so help me understand that better. When you say you wanted to work on larger projects and bring better design at a larger scale, tell me what your hope and expectation is. We wanted to kind of put aside, we discovered through becoming dealers how much BS and bureaucracy and how much political issue there was with the industry. So when you go to a beautiful new tower by some fancy-schmancy architect, and you look inside and you go, why is all this junk inside?

20:11What's the rationale for that? So for instance, we were in some gorgeous tower that was newly finished in Philadelphia by Ennead. And I looked inside and I thought, the furniture is awfully ugly. Why is it all so ugly? And I think the quick answer is it's the politics and the sort of mafia that is the commercial furniture industry. So why is there a convenient substitution from one piece of furniture to another? Well, it's because in the contract dealer world, it's probably because whoever got the main contract isn't going to make as much money on it. So what we kept seeing was for the interior design world or for the architectural interiors universe, furniture that was getting specified was not about great design quality.

20:53that ended up just being about who is making more money through an FF &E spec because everyone has allegiances to these huge three Fortune 500 furniture companies, right? And this is, I think, a known thing, right? It's Miller Knoll, Hayworth, and Steelcase as sort of the powerhouse entities within the commercial furniture landscape. And so we wanted to, you know, not that we detested these companies, but it's more so that we wanted to come in and say, hey, we want to offer a design-first approach to working on these projects, and we're going to try and stubbornly get our way into the door if we can to work with these architects who we admire and interior design firms that we admire to hopefully engage in these projects at scale, whether it's through vintage pieces that get restored, through brand new work, or through work that we might be able to work collaboratively to create new designs that we bring into a project.

21:48Well, so help me understand, David, to follow up on that. why your sense is that this is somehow different from your everyday value engineering that we know goes on in any hospitality project, right, or project of any scale. So sure, they saw the original sample of this beautiful wallpaper made by some higher end to the trade brand, but really what they need is something that's a dollar a roll. And then so, I mean, tell me why this isn't just that in your mind? I see it as more complicated because there's so much consolidation happening in the commercial furniture industry, right? We know that Hayworth owns Poltrona Frau, which owns B &B Italian or whatever all of these kind of complicated relationships are.

22:39And Herman Miller acquired Knoll or however you want to put it. And they own Design Within Reach, which owns these other companies and Edelman Leather and Spinnebeck, etc etc and so it means that the portfolios of work that you see in projects are quite isolated and it means that inherently architecture firms it's maybe like going to a a sub shop and you can only get pepsi products or coke products and actually there's a you know different range in both right you're you're limited not because you're actually limited but you're limited because there's so much power that these major commercial companies have in the industry.

23:17Miller-Knoll dealers on a big tech campus have a lot of power to control and influence a project, and that sometimes will take priority over what the architects or designers intend to is. And it was fascinating coming from the architecture world into this industry, the furniture industry, because we also saw the architect side of things and we saw the kind of rigor and passion that would often go into a design. And then as it kind of gets passed down the line and the ultimate, you know, furnishing and fit out of a space, once that happens, you know, the kind of design intent or the ideas would get very diluted or maybe were completely mismatched with the original intent of the architect.

24:01And I think to some extent, we're operating a business, but we're also trying to sort of protect the integrity of the design of projects simply out of principle and passion. I'm still trying to understand, was the hope that you would get to a big enough scale, that you would be powerful enough somehow to influence this in a meaningful way, at least in some of the projects that you're working on? Is that the idea, Jeremy? Yeah, absolutely. And I I think what's also important to us is the idea of higher quality furnishings. That kind of goes right along with it. We had seen from working in the vintage furniture world just an unbelievable and shocking scale of waste that was coming out of commercial renovations, commercial projects.

24:54For example, take a tower in New York City, right, in Manhattan. And entire floors of large commercial spaces in these towers were often getting cleared out of their furniture, sometimes very expensive furniture. And a lot of that was either getting thrown directly into the dumpster or was being wasted in some other way, right? So we were kind of working in the back end of this world by sort of buying up parts of liquidations and things like that. And so we started to get a sense of the scale of waste. And our hope and sort of desire is to bring higher quality furniture into the industry, into the building and construction industry, as well as bring higher quality design into that world so that the items that end up in building projects can stay there for longer.

25:48people appreciate them for longer. There's kind of love and passion and value in how they look and how they feel as well as how they're made. And it seems another important component of the business related to that is this educational arm. And you've established a huge following on Instagram. I think as I came on the air, it was around 220 ,000 followers. And you're routinely creating this really interesting educational content around vintage pieces, around design, the history and heritage of who all of these people are. Tell me how that fits in with this model, David. The way we started the social media was simply that we didn't have any money for marketing.

26:37And we needed people to figure out who we were and what we were doing. So while we were still in graduate school and just as the company had started, we started experimenting with this. And as nerdy and obsessed people trained in architecture, we were focused on these really high-resolution images of moody stuff in the warehouse or another space and really concerned about full-length videos of crisp resolution. It took us forever. But eventually, we landed on a groove where people were responding really well to videos of us nerding out, preferably with a concrete floor and a white background, on classic pieces of design that we knew really well.

27:19And that started really taking off. And we also started noticing that a lot of important interior designers, product designers, and architects started following us and sort of religiously taking part in commenting in the discourse that was the sort of educational platform that was formed. And I think something we looked at that John Edelman would talk about regularly was creating a sort of community platform. And in the universe of watches, I'm sort of a watch nerd. You and John Edelman both. Yes. Exactly. There's a company called Hodinkee that does an incredible job of building a business through engaging a community of enthusiasts.

28:02And that's sort of something we see as a North Star, which is that our objective is not only to, we're not just sitting around trying to figure out how to make the most money possible. We're trying to figure out how to run a sustainable business in a way that we get to engage with the people who are passionate about the same things that we are. So what was phenomenal about the vintage collection we had is that we had virtually unlimited resources, physical resources as far as furniture, to make content that was new and different all the time. And as the social media grew, what's important to note too is that many of those companies that were telling us all the reasons why they couldn't work with us suddenly shifted and it became, oh, actually, how can, oh, wait, how do we get on those videos?

28:48It's like, well, it would be really awfully nice if we could work with you as a collaborator. And what's great too is that the companies we were pursuing were only companies we were interested in from a quality and design history perspective. And so it often meant that maybe we were getting access to returns and second quality pieces that had been old showroom models. But then with the case of a few brands, we would get in tractor trailer loads of fascinating pieces that we could then photograph and resell sort of in the same pipeline as the vintage and also use to create content. So there's both sort of some circularity going on there as far as how things get back into the market, and also a way of educating our community on pieces that were much more contemporary production.

29:36So some examples that we never had access to for vintage would be works by Foscarini, which we've loved to learn about in the past few years. A relatively recent company founded, I believe, in the 80s that has their heritage in Murano glass. And the Dutch manufacturer Moy that we feel is sort of at the cutting edge of experimentation and design. And we had the privilege of getting access to some of their most wild and crazy works that we could then make video content of and teach people about what's going on today in addition to what was going on in the 1980s, 1960s, 1940s, etc.