Rebecca Jonah’s career has room for a restructuring lawyer, a fashion founder and a shopping mall full of digital possibilities. The settings change. The commercial questions keep returning: who owns something, who gets paid for it, and what can happen to its value after the first deal is done? There is a considerable distance between a creditor negotiation and a pair of cat-eye sunglasses. Jonah has worked in both worlds. The distance makes her story worth a second look.
At The ARIA Network, which she co-founded with Darren Mann, those questions have taken several forms. One chapter concerns retired athletes and digital collectibles. Another concerns retailers, property owners and shoppers carrying phones. Each involves something familiar acquiring another commercial life. A sporting memory can become an experience. A mall can become a place to play a game as well as buy a shirt. Whether people choose to participate is the rather ordinary question underneath the technology.
The value left in the room
Jonah’s earlier professional world was financial restructuring at Akin Gump. Her work involved bondholders and creditors in major US restructurings. That places her career in a business where the vocabulary of value is unusually concrete. Claims, obligations and competing interests have to be dealt with, rather than wished into a more attractive shape. The work happens when a company’s financial arrangements need changing, and the people with money at stake have reasons to care about the details.
It is tempting to turn that background into a tidy explanation for everything that followed. Careers rarely cooperate so politely. Still, the contrast is useful. In restructuring, existing value and obligations are under examination. In a new media business, potential value and new relationships are being assembled. Both raise questions about the people entitled to participate. That is an editorial connection between the two settings, rather than an account of Jonah’s private reasons for moving from one to the other.
Her education preceded the ventures: an undergraduate degree completed at the University of California San Diego in 1997, then law school at Loyola, with a graduate degree completed in 2001. Executive directories also record a partnership at 1457 Investment Group beginning in 2016 and a Co-Chief Executive Officer role at Virtual Rights Management beginning in 2018. These dates give the career some useful depth. ARIA sits within a longer record of professional work, investment and entrepreneurship, rather than arriving as an isolated title.
A showroom, three founders, six pairs of sunglasses
The fashion chapter comes with a photograph. In a 2012 eyewear feature, Jonah appears with her WEAR to CLICK co-founders, Amy Nicole Bernstein and Alison Carreon. The three visited the BluPRint PR showroom to preview Leisure Society’s collection. Their selections ranged across metal frames, round shapes and cat eyes. Jonah chose tortoise Montalivet frames and a burgundy-and-tortoise Swanbourne pair. She liked the retro reference and the restraint of the design. Her brief verdict on the Montalivet was: “They are simply chic!”
It is a small scene, and it earns its place by being specific. Here is a founder discussing an actual product with her collaborators, rather than an executive describing a market in the abstract. The photographed poses have a little mischief in them. Sunglasses are allowed that privilege. The venture’s name also puts wearing and clicking beside each other, years before ARIA’s later retail work brought the phone back into the physical shopping trip.
The photograph makes a useful counterweight to the language of technology. Consumer businesses still concern things people might want, whether those things are frames, clothes or an encounter with a favorite athlete’s history. The device may change; the need for an appealing reason to look remains. That observation does not make the showroom visit a rehearsal for ARIA. It lets the fashion business stand as its own chapter, with its own collaborators and its own delightfully opinionated merchandise.
The life after the playing career
By July 2021, Jonah was speaking as ARIA’s Co-CEO about a different kind of legacy. ARIA Exchange announced a partnership with 21 In Right, representing the Roberto Clemente Estate, to create digital collectibles around significant moments in Clemente’s life. Jonah expressed a hope that current and future baseball fans would experience his life and legacy through the work with his family. The proposed product belonged to a new market; the subject’s history already had generations of people who cared about it.
For this chapter, the important word is permission. Working with an estate places the story within a relationship with those responsible for it. The technology may make a new presentation possible, but the right to use a person’s identity and history is part of the business underneath. Jonah’s earlier legal career makes that relationship particularly interesting to examine. It is possible to appreciate the technology and still find the agreement behind it the more revealing part of the story.
Basketball offered another version of that arrangement. The National Basketball Retired Players Association’s 2021 annual report describes a five-year licensing agreement with Virtual Rights Management. It covered virtual advertising campaigns featuring Legends and digital images sold as NFTs. A June 2022 announcement described an opportunity involving nearly 1,500 basketball legends. The arrangement gave the company a route to work with recognizable sporting identities, while the association sought new uses for its members’ names, images and likenesses.
There is a distinction worth keeping: a licensing opportunity describes what a business can attempt. It does not tell us how many fans bought a product or how much money an athlete received. For Jonah’s career, the significance is the kind of enterprise she was helping lead. It involved agreements with people whose past achievements remained commercially and culturally relevant. Their playing careers had ended. The business of presenting those careers to an audience could continue.
ARIA’s proposed “living” collectibles added another idea: content could be added over time. That made continued engagement part of the product’s design. A fan’s interest in a player might last longer than the excitement of a first purchase, and the company wanted to offer something to return to. The proposition tied ownership to an evolving experience. It also created a practical editorial challenge: the material added later would still need to be something a person wanted to see.
The mall gets another job
The retail chapter puts that problem in a setting with escalators. ARIA worked with Klarna on a 60-day mall sponsorship, including an augmented reality game launched across 25 properties. Mann credited Jonah among the team behind the campaign. Participants could complete the game and receive in-store offers from participating brands, including Sunglass Hut and Forever 21. Here, the digital experience had a straightforward commercial destination: a reason to enter a store.
The game involved collecting virtual coins visible through a phone’s camera and exchanging them for retailer deals. A familiar shopping property acquired a second activity without asking the visitor to leave it. The campaign is useful because it supplies an actual task for the technology. Looking, collecting and redeeming are comprehensible actions. They let the shopper understand what to do next. The mall directory, meanwhile, has quite enough responsibility helping people find the right floor.
Open the camera→02
Collect coins→03
Visit a retailer
By the ICSC Vegas update in May 2025, Mann was describing an AI shopping assistant, personalized offers and links to inventory. Jonah responded by congratulating the team. The shift in emphasis is instructive: the same physical setting can support play, product discovery and practical help. For a business working inside malls, the question becomes how to give the visitor something useful at the moment they are deciding where to go.
The people beside the proposition
Jonah’s public record also has a recurring collective voice. In March 2022, she shared an International Women’s Day recognition from ARIA with a short expression of pride in the team. In 2021, her comments on the expanded executive group emphasized the people joining the company. The appointments brought backgrounds in entertainment, brand marketing and growth into the same organization. Whatever the product required, the business was being assembled through collaborators with different kinds of experience.
“So incredibly proud to be a part of the ARIA Team!”Rebecca Jonah, March 2022
Mann’s own earlier work included Digital Display Networks and City Explorer TV. Jonah brought restructuring experience. Their shared leadership joined two professional histories, and ARIA’s subsequent partnerships added more parties to the picture. Sports alumni, an estate, shopping properties and consumer brands each arrived with interests of their own. In April 2022, Jonah and ARIA colleague Ilona Stepanyants were also included in Shira Lazar’s NFT LA interview series, placing their work among discussions of sport, fashion and entertainment.
Today, ARIA’s live team listing calls Jonah President and Mann CEO. The earlier Co-CEO chapter remains part of the chronology. What persists across the changing titles and settings is a career spent around businesses with several interested parties: creditors, co-founders, investors, rights holders and shoppers. The next encounter matters because a business relationship can outlast the transaction that began it. Jonah’s story is most interesting in that space, where an agreement has been made and someone has to give people a reason to come back.