He built a $7B fashion machine, then traded it for finger paint, ballet barres and improv games. On purpose.
CO-FOUNDER & CEO, TOGETHERHOOD · NEW YORK CITY
In July 2020, remote learning collapsed for the Luft family. Most parents wrote angry emails. Ephraim Luft rented a room and hired teachers. The classroom he built for his own three kids is now a company.
What he's building now
Togetherhood is the unglamorous, essential layer that makes children's enrichment actually work. Schools, residential buildings and community spaces use it to source, schedule and manage programming - the chess club, the hip-hop class, the Tuesday yoga - taught by vetted independent teaching artists and coaches. Ephraim Luft is its co-founder and CEO.
The pitch is simple enough to fit on a napkin: every community wants great enrichment, almost none of them can run it well. A school principal does not want to vet a dance instructor's background check, chase invoices, or rebuild a fall schedule because an improv coach moved to Los Angeles. Togetherhood absorbs that mess so the adults can get back to teaching and the kids can get back to learning something that is not on a standardized test.
It is, in a sense, the same job Luft has always done - take a tangle of logistics and turn it into a product people barely notice because it just works. Only this time the customer is a third grader, and the inventory is wonder.
Not the rich communities. Not the lucky zip codes. Every community. That word is the whole company.
Schools drowning in vendors. Instructors without steady work. Families locked out of quality programming. Togetherhood is built so all three win at once.
The problems we'd lived - schools overwhelmed by vendor complexity, talented instructors without consistent work, families who couldn't access quality programming - exist in every community.
- EPHRAIM & DANIELLE LUFT, ON WHY TOGETHERHOOD EXISTS
The kitchen-table origin
The story does not start in a boardroom. It starts in a living room in 2020, with a screen that kept freezing and three children who had stopped learning. The Lufts could have waited it out. Instead, they did something closer to a startup MVP than a parenting decision: they called dozens of families, rented physical space, hired real teachers, and built a working classroom from nothing.
It worked. So they got greedy in the best way. They brought in theater. Then dance. Then improv and yoga. The pod stopped being a stopgap and started being something kids looked forward to.
That is when the founder brain switched on. Bringing in those instructors, the Lufts noticed two things at once. The instructors were brilliant and chronically underbooked. And families everywhere were desperate for exactly this and couldn't find it. A personal headache had revealed a structural one.
By June 2021, the experiment had a name, a CEO, and a mission. The classroom the Lufts built to survive a bad year became the blueprint for a company meant to outlast it.
By the numbers
The Farfetch growth curve
As Chief Product Officer and a member of the executive board, Luft helped take the global luxury-fashion platform from scrappy startup to public company - and pushed its customer count from 415,000 to 1.4 million along the way.
Farfetch customers, before & after · source: public records
The arc
The through-line
A place for moms to find each other. Grew to roughly 6 million registered users before POPSUGAR acquired it in 2012. Lesson banked: communities scale when you remove friction.
Luxury fashion, at global scale. As CPO he helped engineer a startup-to-$7B-IPO run and tripled the customer base. Lesson banked: great products hide their complexity.
Enrichment for every community. The audience changed; the instinct didn't. Find a tangle people tolerate, then quietly make it disappear.
The paper trail
An engineer who learned to run companies, or an operator who never stopped thinking like an engineer. With Luft it has always been hard to tell where one ends and the other begins - which may be exactly the point.
Things worth knowing
THE BET
Every community deserves the room he built for his own kids.
Follow the trail