Today she’s CEO of a biotech startup, Modern Meadow, and runs her own fashion label, we-ar4, specializing in reusing surplus fabrics and fashions. Like Jain, Bakst majored in industrial engineering at Purdue on a tennis scholarship, but switched to the fashion industry after getting an MBA, becoming a top executive at Donna Karan, Michael Kors and Kate Spade.
She and an identical twin sister, Anna Bakst, followed divergent yet strangely congruent paths. Jain, who speaks in rapid-fire bursts, barely exhausting one idea before she’s off on another, said it all boils down to this: She learned to recognize and capitalize on value where others may see only junk.įiercely competitive, Jain was a varsity tennis player at Purdue University on an athletic scholarship. To Jain, Factory Town is the culmination of two decades of lessons learned in good deals and bad. And she has transplanted to the site a few dozen mature trees, including a massive kapok tree, to create an ecological garden in the middle of east Hialeah’s concrete jungle. She has plans to add artists’ studios, a distillery, bars, inexpensive space for food start-ups and eventually a hotel. But instead of tearing down and starting anew, Jain is in characteristic fashion keeping much of it in all its raw industrial glory - stripping the roofs off crumbling structures that couldn’t be saved and leaving just the walls standing to create an open-air venue for bands and DJ raves and much more. Dubbed Factory Town, it’s an ensemble of warehouse and factory buildings so extensive the property has its own internal streets.
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