An architect by trade, Jennifer Silbert ’94 became an entrepreneur in 2014 when she co-founded Rewilder. Deeply passionate about upcycling and sustainability, Rewilder was born as a way to address the amount of non-recyclable, industrial waste piling up in landfills.
After graduating from Pine Crest, Jennifer attended the University of Pennsylvania where she studied Design of the Environment—a hybrid of art history, art, and architecture. After graduation, she spent a couple of years traveling and working as a photographer and graphic designer before deciding to return to school to earn her masters of architecture degree at Yale University. She began her professional career driven by her personal interests, working with materials and technology.
“As a materials architect, I was problem solving, figuring out how to bring complex designs to life,” Jennifer said. “I translated design created on a computer into the real physical world (my kids would say IRL)—considering gravity, acoustics, connections, intent. It was my job to answer ‘How do we actually build this crazy thing?’ It was exciting and innovative work for 15 years.”
In addition to her full time job, Jennifer began teaching Materials Innovation courses at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. “I knew very quickly that the class would become about upcycling and creative reuse, changing the way that students looked at trash,” she said. “At the beginning, students would inevitably want to use fancy materials like carbon fiber. I’d ask them: do you have the money or tools to work with this material? Why don’t you use the pile of old magazines in the corner, or collect aluminum? All of that valuable and plentiful material makes for great experimentation. It became obvious to me that upcycling was the answer. At the same time, I was researching post industrial materials, seeing what was out there. It was detective work, and I quickly realized that the scale of the problem was way bigger than I even knew. I ended up finding a beer filter cloth from a large American brewery, used to filter hops and barley during production. It’s a beautiful and strong material, designed for high performance. This single brewery throws away two tons of filter cloth every three days; it's a massive amount of waste.”
I thought, ‘I have the right skillset to address this problem.’ In architecture, design always came first, and then material second. Now, I had a material first and I had to decide what to design with it. I flipped the whole process on its head. That was the beginning of the Rewilder journey.”
In 2014, Jennifer and her business partner, Lisa Siedlecki, launched Rewilder, “a sustainable design company on a mission to find wealth in waste. We partner with companies to identify, divert, and upcycle waste materials in their supply chain that are worthy of a second life.” The company got their start with beer filters, discarded airbags and seatbelts, transforming those materials into chic and durable handbags and backpacks.
“Given my background with materials and architecture,” she continued, “and Lisa’s experience as a handbag designer in high fashion, we know that design and sustainability go hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other. We make too much trash, and we can use fashion as a tool to tell this transformative story, to think differently about these discarded materials. Fashion drives culture.”
Another important part of Rewilder is being able to show the environmental impact of the company’s efforts. “Our third partner, Stephanie Choi, joined Rewilder in 2019 to focus on marketing and storytelling,” said Jennifer. “Science and data are now a big part of what we do. Recently, we developed The Comeback Tee, in part through a grant from the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI). We have been part of their incubation program for the last year, which is helping us scale our upcycling work. It is an incredible community of people saving the planet in various ways. The grant funded research and development for The Comeback Tee—the most sustainable t-shirt ever made.”
“The journey your typical t-shirt goes through is epic. We all drop our clothes at Goodwill, and think that’s a good solution. It’s really our only solution for trash textiles. But the truth is only 10% of donated clothes get resold. The rest get shipped overseas, to places like Ghana or Indonesia, where our waste is flooding the market, and often ends up in a landfill. Some of it gets sorted into bales (denim, t-shirts), which is re-bought by American rag shops looking for vintage pieces. One or two pieces may get sold to vintage shops, and the rest become trash again, after literally traveling around the world. It’s an unfortunate story: good material, bad design.”
Rewilder began as a direct to consumer e-commerce business, however, the company has shifted toward a business to business model as companies are caring more about taking responsibility for their materials. “The majority of our work now is with large companies like Disney, the Hollywood Bowl, and Subaru to upcycle their waste streams,” Jennifer said. “We are also consciously moving away from traditional sales models, toward more thoughtful and patient buying. We are going to do really thoughtful design drops, on pre-order only, and then make exactly what is ordered, without any waste or overstock. This is another way that we can challenge the fast fashion standard.”
Reflecting on her career path to Rewilder, Jennifer says she started with very limited knowledge of business. “I have an art brain, so I had to learn business as best I could,” she said. “We did everything ourselves—website design, cost analysis, accounting, design and all the other thousand pieces that birth something. We had a massive list on the wall. And we pivoted A LOT over the years, testing and experimenting to learn what people are ready for. I’m proud to say that many of those original designs are still part of our core line—proving that good design lasts.”
Upcycling and creative reuse was always natural for Jennifer. “I have always been an avid dumpster diver,” she said. “In high school, as soon as I could drive, I was knocking on doors at tile shops and asking to look through their trash for scraps to make art. It’s the same thing I do today, only on a much larger scale. Jennifer shares the longer term goal and philosophy of Rewilder, and where the company is headed in the near future.
“Very often and very quickly people say we have to move production overseas to bring costs down,” said Jennifer. “But our ethos is about community, valuing the people that make our things, and we are rooted in Los Angeles. We have a vision for social and environmental change, and it starts simply by using the things we have in front of us. The baseline is that upcycling is the best, most healing solution for our planet.”
