Like many startups, Rarify was born in a college dorm. Founders Jeremy Bilotti and David Rosenwasser met at Cornell University, where they became fast friends, bonding over a love of modernist design. In Rosenwasser’s case, it wasn’t just a passion, but a business. In high school, he had started buying and selling vintage furniture, trading his way up to a $120,000 sale to a client in the Philippines. It was the seed money for what would eventually become Rarify.

Bilotti and Rosenwasser knew they wanted to work together, but it took them a few years of grad school—Bilotti went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Rosenwasser to Harvard University—to narrow it down. A mentor, industrial designer Stephen Burks, helped show the way. “He said, ‘Guys, you have all these interests in design and technology. You have this existing, amazing collection of vintage furniture and experience with furniture design. Why not combine those two things and use the furniture as a foundation to build this business?’” recalls Bilotti on the latest episode of The Business of Home Podcast. “The idea for Rarify became a digital gallery.”

That’s how it started. But Rarify has since grown to become a unique hybrid business. The two still sell vintage furniture online, but they’ve also become dealers for more than 100 contemporary design brands; they act as consultants on commercial design projects; they have a brick-and-mortar outpost in Philadelphia; and maintain a thriving social media presence dedicated to hooky furniture content. The through line? The same love of design that launched the business in the first place.

“We’re not sitting around trying to figure out how to make the most money possible,” says Rosenwasser. “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.”

Crucial insight: One of the tools the partners used to grow their business was their Instagram account, where they have amassed 220,000 followers and post content about the evolution of design. “We didn’t really have any money for marketing, and we needed people to figure out who we were and what we were doing,” says Rosenwasser. “Just as the company started, we began experimenting with high-resolution images of moody stuff in the warehouse and 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. That started really taking off.” The pair have since nurtured a passionate design community and view the app as a way to secure future customers. “That audience is much younger than most of the audience of many of our competitors. We hope it’s work and time and love and energy that’s well spent, whether it’s going to benefit us now or 20 years from now, when some of those junior designers are maybe leading architecture and interiors practices,” says Rosenwasser. “That’s how we look at Instagram.”

Key quote: “As much as we love the history of design and can appreciate it, we feel that there’s a huge void to be filled. And we also don’t feel that it’s necessary for good, innovative new designs to be extremely expensive. Certainly there needs to be some value and some level of quality. But by building up this collection of both vintage and new products that we work alongside manufacturers to sell, we’ve seen and combed through and developed a digital database of thousands of products and millions of data points, and we can very clearly see that there is really good design at a whole scale and range of price points,” says Bilotti. “We often say to each other, ‘What’s the excuse? Why is there not better design happening?’ And I think there are more and more voices that are starting to say that now, as the culture around design, enthusiasm [for] and appreciating design is growing and becoming more robust in the United States.”

This episode is sponsored by Loloi. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

The Thursday Show

Host Dennis Scully and BOH executive editor Fred Nicolaus discuss the biggest news in the design world, including an AI report from Houzz, Loro Piana’s labor violations and a spirited defense of the china cabinet.

This episode is sponsored by Loloi. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.