Here’s the section of the website where you tell your brand’s story.

Simple enough, right? 

Except when I sat to write this, I cried. 

Because at Glimmer we sell coffee — yes — but we are about more than coffee. So much more. 

Hi, I'm Suzanne, creator of Glimmer Coffee. Glimmer took shape in the spring of 2021 when my second daughter, May, was stillborn. It was my third pregnancy: miscarriage, live birth, stillbirth. I was crushed. 

I had been working on a side hustle at the time in addition to pursuing a certification as a lactation counselor, and as I started to pick up the pieces of my life, I knew that Glimmer (my side hustle) was meant to become a means for raising large sums of money to help families coping with miscarriage and stillbirth.

A “you buy, we give” model. Think Toms. And Bombas.  

There are a lot of "kicks when you're down" after a stillbirth, but the one that caught me most off guard was the flood of medical bills that started showing up weeks after leaving the hospital... just as I was wrapping my head around my new reality. I’d had a baby before so I should have known they were coming, but it was the furthest thing from my mind and the last thing I wanted to enter a credit card to pay for. (I was "lucky" enough to miscarry at home with no need for medical intervention.)

Glimmer donates $1 from every bottle of coffee sold to Love, Jessica - a 501(c)3 non-profit that helps cover medical bills and funeral expenses after a miscarriage or stillbirth, helping to alleviate the financial and emotional burden that comes with paying these bills (love-jessica.org).

So why do we sell coffee here at Glimmer? Because it's something I've always loved but only recently learned how inorganically and unethically it's typically grown: forests torn down to make room for more crops… farmers not paid a livable wage for their work… hundreds of pounds of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers poured into every acre.

Yes, you can have coffee during pregnancy and breastfeeding, but it must be the right kind and in the right amount. Not all coffee was created equally; coffee beans are among the most chemically-treated crops on the planet with caffeine-levels that vary so widely across brands.

You should be able to drink a cup of coffee and know exactly how much caffeine is in it. Know that it's clean for you and baby, ethically sourced, and you shouldn't have to give an inch on flavor in order to get that (a big problem with most coffee concentrates and most half caff, low acid coffees).

Coffee should be delicious, non-toxic, easy on your stomach, support its farmers and — for pregnant and breastfeeding women — have controlled levels of caffeine. Yes, coffee can still be a simple, daily joy while pregnant and breastfeeding. Thank goodness, because lord knows we mamas need coffee more than most anyone (now if only we could drink it while it's still hot).