If you are under 30 years old and you know how to authenticate a Saarinen tulip table, chances are you have Jeremy Bilotti and David Rosenwasser to thank for it. The two are the co-founders of Rarify, a multifaceted business that does everything from selling Emeco chairs to importing hard-to-source Japanese woodwork, but their most widely known incarnation is an Instagram account dedicated to the past, present and future of great design. To an audience of 213,000 followers, Bilotti and Rosenwasser deliver bite-size lectures on everything from hyper-rare “zebra wood” Eames loungers to contemporary pieces by Patricia Urquiola and the Bouroullec brothers.

Rarify's new Pennsylvania showroomNatasha Felker and Charlie Schuck of Felker Schuck

A hooky-but-educational approach has earned them a sizable following and fans among the industry’s movers and shakers. That Bilotti and Rosenwasser—both 30—have made design minutiae appealing to a younger audience is particularly admired by veterans who worry about the rising generation’s fascination with dupes. “Storytelling and ‘geeking out’ about design are things the industry desperately needs,” says John Edelman, the former CEO of DWR and now president and CEO of Heller, who has mentored Bilotti and Rosenwasser and appeared in their videos. “The client base for this type of product has a hunger for education and they have a natural way of feeding them.”

But Rarify is first and foremost a furniture business, not an Instagram account. And Bilotti and Rosenwasser are looking to build something more ambitious than a library of short-form videos about rare chairs. Since founding Rarify in 2021, they’ve grown their team to 15 and are working with architecture and design firms on increasingly large-scale projects. This month, the pair opened their first showroom in Philadelphia—a jewel box chock-full of midcentury grails. They’ve made furniture nerdery cool on social media. The next step is to make it pay.

Bilotti and Rosenwasser met at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning and quickly bonded. “David and I were on the same wavelength when it came to an obsession with furniture and manufactured design objects,” says Bilotti. “We immediately hit it off.”

Bilotti had become fascinated with midcentury furniture in high school, after taking painting lessons from a family friend whose house was an “oasis” of design in suburban New Jersey. Rosenwasser, a Pennsylvania native, had slightly more skin in the game. After becoming fixated on his father’s Eames lounger, he saved up enough to buy an Eames LCW chair, a purchase that kicked off a high school furniture flipping hustle. By the time he graduated, Rosenwasser had a serious collection—serious enough to sell a container full of midcentury pieces to a client in the Philippines for $120,000. He used the cash to formally launch a vintage resale business and picked up a Nakashima coffee table with the change.

At Cornell, the pair studied architecture by day, experimenting with fabrication and material science in the school’s research labs on the side. All the while, Rosenwasser’s vintage business, D Rose Mod, hummed along in the background, with a Pennsylvania storage facility slowly getting fuller. After graduating, instead of getting deep into Ph.D. programs or toiling at prestigous architecture firms, the pair decided to collaborate on a business. In 2021, Rarify was born.

Early on, the pair realized that Rarify couldn’t just be vintage. While the margins on vintage are healthy, the resale business has some built-in limitations. Crucially, the availability of stock is unpredictable, making it difficult to sell at scale to architects and designers, the industry’s most desirable customers. To grow the business, Bilotti and Rosenwasser would have to work with contemporary brands and embrace a version of the dealer model. But with that came a new challenge: how to get the names they had long admired—Moooi, Carl Hansen, Knoll—to take a chance on two well-educated twentysomethings with a warehouse and a website?

Early on, Bilotti and Rosenwasser became adept at leveraging their limited resources to put a foot in the door. They took in big brands’ returns and slightly worn floor models, zhuzhed them up, photographed them well and sold them on consignment—both a revenue stream and a way to build relationships. It worked, but roadblocks remained.

“As young people in this space, even with fancy-schmancy educations, it has been a real uphill battle,” says Rosenwasser. At first, they were shot down because they didn’t have a showroom. When they opened one as an extension of their warehouse in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, it was deemed too rural. “There were all these excuses for why certain brands would refuse to work with us. We found a lot of friction based on age and economics. If we didn’t have a ton of money where we could buy floor models for every single brand, we were going to have to find a creative way of working around those parameters.”

Social media was a way to get some leverage. The pair experimented with a variety of formats, from long-form, highly edited videos to moody, atmospheric shots of their warehouse. Neither worked. After a lot of trial and error, Bilotti and Rosenwasser hit on a fairly straightforward format: a white background, a great piece of design and some quick-but-deep insight on what makes it special. The account started to take off.

“Our marketing budget was zero, but we had this incredible arsenal of classic design that was constantly coming in,” says Rosenwasser. “So we made videos on vintage Eames loungers, and Saarinen and Corbusier—all the historical icons—and that built up quite a big following for us. Once we reached a critical mass of tens of thousands of followers, brands very quickly were like, ‘Wait a second, how do we get some stuff on there?’”

The irony of Rarify’s success on Instagram is that, while they have cultivated a big audience of eager young design addicts, that demographic is only buying so many USM credenzas. Bilotti and Rosenwasser used social media to get brands on board, but their biggest customers for those brands are architecture and design firms.

To that end, Bilotti and Rosenwasser have been prioritizing the trade, hosting a cocktail party at BDNY, starting a separate “Rarify for Business” account on Instagram and launching an FF&E live tracker they built for their site (as if Cornell architecture school wasn’t enough, Bilotti also has a master’s in computer science from MIT). “Our challenge in the last two years has been about communicating to the world that we have the capability to do big projects,” says Bilotti. “People see us on Instagram and say, ‘Oh, these are the guys that make the chair videos.’ But we just installed a project [with a] $1 million budget in Baltimore that we did all the furniture, warehousing and inventory management for. … We figured out how to do guerilla marketing. Now how do we do the same thing to engage with architects and designers we’d like to work with?”

Another irony: Even with one of the buzziest furniture accounts on Instagram, Rarify still had some holdouts. Opening a showroom in Philadelphia was partially about establishing a brick-and-mortar beachhead for Rarify but also partially to finally satisfy some brands’ requirement that their dealers have a physical location in a significant market.

“By the numbers, it’s a bad idea, right? Investing in a showroom in 2024 when everyone is discounting—it’s not a good idea,” says Rosenwasser. “But I live upstairs, which allows us to use it as a house plus a showroom and open up those floors when we have events, which helps make the money work. We also saw it as an opportunity to bring in the brands we were struggling to bring in, like Herman Miller, where it was going to be impossible to work with them unless we had a brick-and-mortar facility.”

In that, it follows a trend for Rarify: By design or necessity, nothing Rosenwasser and Bilotti do is just one thing. A vintage resale warehouse doubles as a photo studio. A buzzy Instagram account is a way to get new accounts for a dealership business. A showroom is an event venue. It’s early. There will be more doubling—and twists and turns—to come. The pair are working on ways to sic AI on the data they’ve collected on their inventory. At some point, they’d like to design furniture themselves.

“We've intentionally not taken on any outside funding or capital because we want to remain independent,” says Bilotti. “We want to be able to protect design integrity and do things differently—disrupt the industry in a positive way and put good quality work out into the world. Part of that is being able to have the autonomy to do things the way we want to do them.”