Lavina Kalwani entwines sustainability, fashion

By Juliana Lightsey     1/28/25 11:11pm

In May 2023, a Berkeley Law School sticker adorned Lavina Kalwani’s laptop; she had been accepted and was set to attend in the fall. Four months later, Kalwani found herself on a completely different path: weaving together entrepreneurship and sustainable fashion while pursuing her Master of Business Administration at Rice.

Kalwani said her primary concern is the amount of fabric that ends up in landfills, as a result of a fast-paced clothing industry. Reema Textiles, her small-scale business initiative, aims to take fabric that would have gone to waste and repurpose it for designers to purchase and use.

Kalwani developed Reema at the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation & Entrepreneurship, but she is no stranger to Rice — she completed her undergraduate education in neuroscience and sociology in 2021. 

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“Advocacy was a big part of my undergrad experience,” Kalwani said. “Post-grad, I worked for a couple different public defenders’ offices, [I was] full-on ready to go to law school. But the closer I got to law school, the more this idea of being an attorney just didn’t feel right … Within a couple of weeks, I withdrew my admission, I found out about the Rice MBA program and decided to apply.”

After Kalwani’s undergraduate studies, she worked part-time at a small apparel business. That job, she said, opened her eyes to other career possibilities she might find more fulfilling than law. 

“I was gaining this new realization,” Kalwani said. “The fact that you can have a career, something apparel-related in business … Which had always felt so out of reach for me.”

Following her enrollment at the Jones Graduate School of Business, Kalwani began to develop her vision of her own business — to reduce fabric waste at the forefront of her mind. She did her research, going to markets and asking shop owners questions: What does their waste stream look like? How is donated clothing sorted into ‘recyclable’ and ‘landfill-bound’? What textiles can’t be reused?

“I was really obsessed with this problem,” Kalwani said. “That was my mission.”

Alongside fellow MBA student Ahmad Tipu, Kalwina piloted Reema, and began taking on paying customers.

“We realized the way we could do it was to take larger pieces of clothing that are easier to upcycle … or fabrics, things like bedsheets, and then re-sort them so it’s easier for designers and creatives to find what they’re looking for,” Kalwani said. “In that way [it] served as a ‘used fabric store’.”

However, a year into her MBA, an opportunity to gain experience working in the venture capital field led Kalwani to put Reema on pause. Although she was momentarily unable to continue leading a small business, Kalwani still felt the urge to keep the project alive.

“This was the first time that I had a moment where I was able to blend fashion and art and business, and I never even thought that was possible for me before so I really wanted to continue that,” Kalwani said. “How can I continue to be more creative in my everyday [and] continue to engage with the textile and design world?”

Kalwani’s solution was to prompt community engagement with Reema, through artistic expression. She tried her hand at design alongside co-designer Poppy Han, creating clothing from her upcycled fabrics, which she then debuted at Austin’s Slow Fashion Festival in October 2024.

“Debuting that was super cool … having models that were wearing my designs down the runway,” Kalwani said. “That was something I never would have imagined two years ago.”

Following the show, Kalwani continued to search for other ways to continue her engagement with fashion and business while balancing her other responsibilities. She decided to launch a magazine associated with Reema – dubbed “Liquid Lace” – and solicit a broad range of creative submissions, from poetry to textile art.

“I have this habit where whenever I want to do something I bring other people along with me,” Kalwani said. “The response that I got was amazing … It’s a collection of really diverse types of art … that all have this thread of fashion and textiles underlying it.”

Liquid Lace has completed its first round of submissions, Kalwani said, and she is beginning to sort through them now, with a tentative first issue slated for March. Seeing the diversity and quantity of the submissions has been very fulfilling, according to Kalwani.

“I’ve had teachers submit, I’ve had people in their fifties, I’ve had people doing MFA programs,” Kalwani said. “That was really special to me … It makes me feel like there’s only going to be more momentum moving forward.”

When it comes to the future of Reema, Kalwani said she would be interested in picking up the textile company again, after developing her career more. Her biggest takeaways from the project, however, are the values and objectives at Reema’s core.

“I can’t say that I’m going to pursue this exact idea in the exact same way,” Kalwani said. “But do I think that we need people in that space to address overconsumption and waste from the fashion world? Absolutely, and I want to be one of those people.”

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