Under the Gratiot bridge by Eastern Market, the walls are caked with graffiti — or, to use Amy Peterson’s preferred term, “street art” — peeling into colorful paint chips.
She holds up a large chunk from the ground to show me. This is the exact location where, over a decade ago, she found the first piece for her jewelry line, Rebel Nell.
The low-profit company produces handmade jewelry that incorporates repurposed materials. As Peterson demonstrates in her workshop, it takes only a Tic Tac-size dot of paint to complete most of the jewelry pieces.
In addition to its commitment to sustainability, Rebel Nell employs women transitioning out of homelessness. These employees start off making $15 an hour with paid time off, “and they move up pretty quickly,” Peterson says.
A native of Jamestown, New York, Peterson first moved to Detroit in 2007, with the dream of becoming the first female general manager of a Major League Baseball team.
She spent over a decade with the Detroit Tigers as an arbitration attorney. But by the end of it, she says, “I was feeling a little bit stuck in the growth of my role.”
The idea for Rebel Nell first sparked when Peterson lived near Detroit’s Coalition on Temporary Shelter. On regular walks with her dog, she got to know some of the shelter’s residents, helping them out financially when she could.
“I started getting to know their stories, why they left challenging situations and ended up there,” she says.
In 2013, Peterson, serving as CEO, founded Rebel Nell with then-Chief Operating Officer Diana Roginson as “an outlet to empower women,” she says.
Among the company’s first employees was Karen Hopes, who started that year. Hopes first heard about Rebel Nell when she was living at COTS, and her case manager suggested she go to an interview.
She went on to be employed with the company for a year and a half and describes the workplace as “a great opportunity for individuals that think life has stopped when it comes to being employed,” Hopes says. Today, Hopes works for a nonprofit, connecting people dealing with mental health and substance use disorders to resources they might need. This includes food, shelter, counseling, employment, and vocational training.
“You never know what people are recovering from, and I have lived experience,” Hopes says. “They need someone to listen — and listen with their whole heart.”
Hopes and other members of the opening employee group at Rebel Nell remain in touch with one another. And at any given time, Hopes says, the group knows that Peterson and Roginson are “just a phone call away.”
Since its humble beginnings, Rebel Nell has expanded rapidly, with two locations in Detroit, one at Detroit Metro Airport, and one that opened last October in Grand Rapids. Over the years, the company has introduced several lines that tap into Detroit nostalgia. They have incorporated bits of bags once used at J.L. Hudson’s, pieces of the old purple Detroit Zoo water tower banner, scraps from the Packard Plant, material from locker room seats at the demolished Joe Louis Arena, and debris from rocks painted by numerous student groups on local college campuses. For last year’s Downtown Detroit Partnership Fall Forum, Rebel Nell created a limited-edition pin symbolizing the Detroit-Windsor partnership.
But all of its successes didn’t come easy. As Peterson notes, she learned many lessons along the way. In 2016, the company hit a “rough patch.”
“We had a lot of stuff happening with the women that we were employing, and we weren’t equipped to handle it,” she says. “We were trying to provide it all for them. A lot of it was at the company’s cost and expense. … We were not going to survive that year.”
That led Peterson and Roginson to start a nonprofit called Teach Empower Achieve. The nonprofit administers a tiered program designed to help its participants achieve financial stability. This includes wraparound services — including financial support and legal and mental health assistance — as well as job training, job placement, and financial literacy courses. Since its inception, TEA has provided these services to more than 160 people.
2025 was a busy year for Peterson. In July, she appeared on My Kind of Town, a Good Morning America series highlighting “local hero[es] making their hometown[s] proud.” In August, Rebel Nell was the grand prize recipient of H&R Block’s highly competitive Fund Her Future business grant, earning $50,000 and a year of small business services.
And a month before the Grand Rapids Rebel Nell opening, Peterson was cutting the ribbon with Mayor Mike Duggan at The Rectory. The new pizza place is on the grounds of The Congregation, a former church-turned-coffee-shop in her neighborhood, Boston-Edison. She owns both establishments with her husband and two other business partners.
“I’m very grateful for the city,” she says. “It has given me an opportunity to pursue my dreams.”
Of all her dreams, one for the future of Rebel Nell may be the most unconventional.
“My dream is that Rebel Nell goes out of business because there are no more women that we need to employ out of shelters,” Peterson says. “If that’s why I go out of business, what an incredible, remarkable story that is.”
This story originally appeared in the January 2026 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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