By Greg Rollett, Grommet

This article is presented by Grommet, the leading product discovery platform for new and emerging makers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Discover products you never knew existed, but soon won’t be able to live without, right here.

In 2018, Sarah Fox had what most people would consider a pretty good life. She worked at a scuba shop on the island of Guam, where the ocean was warm and the diving was constant. Multiple days every week, she was in the water. What she could not get comfortable with was what the Pacific did to her hair on the way back up. “Back in 2018, working at a scuba shop in Guam, my hair was a constant battle,” she says. “It would get so tangled at times that I had to cut out entire rat’s nests just to manage it.”

She tried everything the beauty aisle had to offer: hours in the shower with conditioner and a detangling brush, standard hair ties of every variety. Nothing fixed the problem in a lasting way. So she started experimenting with elastics, combining them in configurations she had not seen before. Before long, she was making hair ties for her long-haired scuba diving friends. They loved them. She noted this and moved on.

Rip Tie Hair launched on Grommet on September 18, 2025, and has since earned 744 upvotes. The patent-pending 3-pack retails for $21, or $16.80 with the upvote discount.

A Social Worker, an Ocean, and a Decision to Change Course

Most people who learn Sarah Fox holds a Master of Social Work are a little surprised. It is not a credential that immediately maps onto “product inventor” or “e-commerce founder.” But Sarah sees it differently. “The most unexpected thing about my background is that I didn’t come from business at all,” she says. “I have a Masters in Social Work, which taught me to deeply understand people’s needs. This skill turned out to be just as valuable in creating Rip Ties as any business course.”

She eventually left her job to return to school, and during that transition she needed a way to cover expenses. The hair ties she had been making by hand for her scuba friends came back to mind. “Rip Tie Hair started as a creative way to help my family cover expenses,” she says, “but over the course of my education, it turned into a business that took on a life of its own.”

When Braids Become the Enemy

As Sarah dug into how athletes and outdoor people manage their hair, she found something counterintuitive: braids, the go-to solution for generations of active women, are actually part of the problem. Individual strands crossing over each other create friction. Friction creates tangles and, over time, breakage. The conventional solution was causing the very damage it was supposed to prevent.

That idea became the structural foundation of Rip Tie Hair: a tangle-free design that holds every strand parallel, not interlocked.

One by One, Then All at Once

For a while, Sarah made every Rip Tie by hand. One at a time. That approach worked until customer demand moved faster than two hands could keep up.

Finding the right manufacturer proved to be its own education. She worked through multiple factories, collecting samples, adjusting specifications, running tests. She found one that seemed to meet her standards and placed a full order. When the shipment arrived, the product was wrong. Entirely, unsellably wrong. “It was so discouraging at the time,” she says, “but that experience clarified to me how important the smallest details are in manufacturing, and set the bar for the Rip Ties standard.”

That failed order hardened something in how she approaches the product today. Every element gets scrutiny: the natural rubber elastic, the patent-pending construction, the multicolor packs. The three colorways in the signature set are named Dawn Patrol, Rippled Water, and Sunset, each a nod to the same ocean that first made the product necessary. These are not marketing decisions. They are details made meaningful by the work it took to get them right.

The Roommate Who Changed the Trajectory

Sarah Fox did not have a mentor who flew in with capital and connections. She had a roommate.

“The first person to believe in Rip Ties was actually my roommate. I made her one, and she looked at me and said, ‘You could sell these, you know. I would buy one.’”

Sarah Fox

That simple, unguarded reaction was the first signal that the idea had legs. Before a Grommet listing, before a manufacturer, before the failed order, there was a roommate in an apartment trying something on and saying what she honestly thought.

What a Firefighter Taught Her About the Product

Success, for Sarah Fox, is not a revenue figure. It is a specific kind of email.

One of the early messages that shifted her understanding of what she had built came from a female firefighter. Her hair had been a persistent problem on the job, catching in gear, pulling at critical moments, adding friction to an already demanding physical environment. After trying Rip Tie, she wrote to say the problem was finally solved. Then more women in physically demanding jobs sent versions of the same story.

“It makes me proud, because while hair accessories are often seen as frivolous, Rip Ties is helping women in tough, demanding jobs feel more comfortable and capable,” she says.

The Grommet community brought customers she had never explicitly designed for: motorcycle riders, hikers, equestrians, competitive swimmers, parents of young athletes who needed a tie that survived full days of motion. She had built the product for the ocean. It turned out the ocean was just the first application.

The Life She Is Building

Sarah Fox runs Rip Tie Hair alongside her family, including a toddler whose schedule does not negotiate. The hours have not gotten shorter. If anything, entrepreneurship has added to them. But they have become her own.

On hard days, she thinks about her son and the firefighter’s email, and about the woman she was in Guam spending hours with a detangling brush convinced there had to be a better answer.

Being part of a community like Grommet, one that leads with story rather than search rank, fits the kind of business she set out to build. “Being part of a community that uplifts small makers is energizing and validating,” she says. “It’s a reminder that what we create matters, and that independent brands can thrive when people come together to support creativity and quality.”

She started with a problem she had in the ocean. She ended up solving one shared by firefighters, runners, and girls playing sports on sweaty afternoons. That is what a good product does.

Get 20% Off Rip Tie Hair

Right now, readers of the Grommet Blog can get 20% off Rip Tie Hair through our maker community on Grommet. Just head over to the product page, give it an upvote, and your discount unlocks instantly.

Shop the V-JSHAVE Razor on Grommet | Launched January 15, 2026 | 64 Upvotes

The Bathroom Moment She Couldn’t Shake

Jami Bolduc had done this a hundred times. She stood in her bathroom, razor in hand, going through the same routine she had followed her entire adult life. But when she finished and looked more closely, the results stopped her cold. She had just gone through the full effort of shaving and the outcome was uneven at best, incomplete at worst.

It was not the first time. For as long as Jami could remember, traditional razors had failed her the same way: too bulky, too awkward, clearly not designed with a woman’s body in mind. They could not navigate curves. They missed the spots that mattered. They left skin irritated in the process. But this time, the frustration stayed with her.

The Dream That Became a Patent

That night, Jami fell asleep with the frustration still turning in her mind. What happened next is the kind of detail that would be easy to dismiss as embellishment, except that she acted on it too quickly and too specifically for it to be anything but real.

The solution came to her in a dream.

She woke up the next morning and remembered it clearly: a razor with a triangular, pivoting head that could follow the body’s curves instead of fighting them. She started searching immediately to see if anything like it already existed. It did not. By that afternoon, she was sketching the design. By the following day, she had hired a patent attorney.

Most inventors hesitate. They research, deliberate, second-guess, and let time pass until the urgency fades. Jami went from dream to patent attorney in a single rotation of the sun. That speed was not recklessness. It was the accumulated result of years spent learning that hesitation costs more than action.

Dollar Store Razors and a Boyfriend Named Paul

Before the V-JSHAVE Razor became the sleek, patented product it is today, it was something considerably less glamorous. Jami and her boyfriend Paul sat together with a handful of dollar store razors, taking them apart, cutting blades, and gluing pieces together to approximate the triangular shape she had envisioned.

“They definitely weren’t pretty,” she says. But they were essential. Those rough, reassembled prototypes allowed her to physically test whether the concept could work, and each iteration brought her closer to something she could refine.

The final result carries almost no physical resemblance to those first creations. The V-JSHAVE Razor features a triangular pivoting head, a four-blade shaving system, aloe-infused lubrication strips, a detachable head design, and an ergonomic handle built for control in sensitive areas like the bikini line, underarms, and knees. It is the difference between a glued prototype and a patent. But she credits those messy early versions as foundational to the entire process.

Through all of it, Paul stood beside her. He was the first person to fully believe in the idea, to show up not just as a partner but as a co-builder in the uncertain early stages. “His belief in me gave me the courage to fully step into it,” she says. “It helped turn confidence in the idea into confidence in myself.”

Building Through the Hard Seasons

To understand what it took to bring V-JSHAVE to life, you have to understand what Jami was carrying while she built it.

Before she became an inventor, she was a caregiver. She had dedicated a significant chapter of her life to caring for her mother: a season that taught her, in her own words, “patience, resilience, and the importance of showing up, even when the path ahead is uncertain.” Perseverance, she explains, was never something she chose as a mindset. It was something that life pressed into her.

Most product origin stories skip the hard parts. Jami’s does not. She built her company while holding grief in one hand and a prototype in the other. That context does not just explain how she got here. It explains why she did not quit.

The Moment a Customer Made Her Cry

There is a particular kind of validation that no pitch deck can manufacture: the kind that arrives in the form of a stranger’s words.

For Jami, it came when a customer reached out to share how the V-JSHAVE Razor had changed her routine. She had found something that finally worked where everything else had failed.

She had built the razor because she knew the frustration firsthand. But hearing that someone with no connection to her bathroom moment, her dream, or her dollar store prototypes had found real relief in what she created was something else entirely. “That feedback validated the entire journey,” she says, “and reminded me exactly why I started.”

A Smarter Razor, Built for Every Curve

The V-JSHAVE Razor is available now on Grommet, and it addresses a gap that women have quietly worked around for decades. Traditional razors are rectangular by design, built for flat surfaces, and largely indifferent to the topography of a woman’s body. The V-JSHAVE’s triangular, pivoting head does what no mass-market razor has been engineered to do: follow curves closely, reach difficult angles, and deliver a close shave without dragging or irritating sensitive skin.

At $19.99, with aloe-infused lubrication built in and an ergonomic handle designed for control where it counts, it is not just a better razor. It is the product Jami spent years wishing someone would make before she realized she would have to be the one to do it.

The Making of a Maker

Jami describes her favorite part of being an independent maker as “the freedom to create with intention and stay true to my vision.” Every decision in V-JSHAVE’s development reflects care and purpose rather than shortcuts or compromise.

She is not someone who was born into entrepreneurship or handed a clear path. She is someone who was shaped by caregiving, grief, and the specific kind of stubbornness it takes to hire a patent attorney the morning after a dream. Being welcomed into a community that champions small makers is something she takes seriously. “It represents encouragement, shared understanding, and the feeling of not building in isolation,” she says.

On difficult days, she returns to the same ground every time: “Perseverance has carried me through much harder seasons in life. Consistency, even on hard days, is how meaningful things are built.”

That belief did not come from a business book. It came from a bathroom, a dream, a dollar store, and a woman from Brainerd, Minnesota, who decided not to wait for someone else to solve her problem.

Upvote the V-JSHAVE Razor on Grommet to unlock your exclusive 20% discount.

By Greg Rollett, Grommet

This article is presented by Grommet, the leading product discovery platform for new and emerging makers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Check out thousands of products you never knew existed, but soon won’t be able to live without: right here.

The bus home was crowded, the way it always is at the end of a long workday. Gary Wong had his backpack on one shoulder and a coffee in one hand, and he was trying to reach into his front pocket for his Metro card. His wallet was wedged in there, thick and overstuffed, and the outer card slot was pulled so tight that extracting a single card required a pinching, pulling focus he did not have while balancing a drink and a bag. He nearly dropped the coffee. He did not drop the coffee. But standing there, fumbling at the reader, something clarified.

He had been tolerating this for years. Most people have.

The Long Look at an Overstuffed Wallet

Once he sat down on the bus, Gary did something most people never do. Instead of reaching for his phone, he looked at his wallet. He took it out and examined it the way you examine an object carried so long it has become invisible.

How many cards did it hold? How many of them had he actually used in the past month? He thought about the card slots on the back he had never opened. He thought about the cash folded into the bill compartment that pushed the whole thing outward. The wallet had been built for an imagined version of carrying, not for the way he actually moved through his days.

The solution came quickly, and it came complete. He could see the design in his head: slim enough for the front pocket, a quick-access slot for the card he used daily, RFID protection built in from the first layer out, a detachable MagSafe component so the most-used cards could ride on his phone when his hands were already full.

Gary runs Nova Safety Tools, based in Hong Kong, and he builds products around a single operating principle: good design should reduce the small daily frictions people have stopped noticing because they have lived with them too long. The Minimalist RFID Blocking Wallet with MagSafe, now available on Grommet, launched in October 2025 and has collected 126 upvotes. Upvoting the product unlocks 20% off your order.

Everything You Actually Carry

The wallet is a rethinking of what carrying requires. The body is microfiber and aluminum alloy, built to a profile of 11.6 by 7.6 centimeters. A quick-thumb access slot handles the card you reach for most often. A dedicated cash slot fits USD bills. An ID card slot is built in. The detachable MagSafe card holder snaps onto any iPhone 13 through 16, or any MagSafe case, and locks back onto the wallet itself when not attached to a phone. RFID-blocking technology runs throughout, protecting credit and debit cards from the contactless skimming that is increasingly common in dense commuter environments.

The wallet does not try to carry everything. It tries to carry everything you actually use, and nothing you do not.

Gary’s target was the person who knows this frustration: commuters reaching for transit cards, professionals whose bulky wallet ruins the clean line of a jacket, travelers juggling passports and boarding passes in crowded airports. Every one of them has quietly accepted a design that was never built for how they move.

Millimeters of Precision

Gary’s first prototype was, in his own description, a little clunky. He hand-cut layers of stiff material and stitched them together, trying to balance slimness with RFID shielding. The shielding worked. But the wallet felt rigid, the card slots were either too tight or too loose depending on the layer combination, and the overall profile remained bulkier than what he had sketched.

What followed was months of trial and error.

Every time I made the wallet thinner, it risked losing structure or making the RFID shield too rigid. Early prototypes either felt flimsy or so stiff that sliding out a card was frustrating.

Gary Wong

The path forward ran through precision at the millimeter level. He trimmed, tested, and retrimmed. He pushed suppliers to custom-cut certain layers to his specifications rather than accepting standard cuts that were close but not exact. He worked closely with craftsmen who understood that half a millimeter mattered, because in a wallet you carry every day in a front pocket, half a millimeter is the difference between something you notice constantly and something you stop noticing entirely.

That collaboration, custom-cut layers, millimeter-level tolerances, and precision craftsmen who took the specifications seriously, is what separates the final wallet from that first stiff prototype. The card slots are firm enough to hold without releasing unintentionally. They release with a single thumb press.

The First Wallet You Forget You’re Wearing

One of the early pieces of meaningful feedback came from a commuter who bought the wallet for his daily train rides into the city. He told Gary that his old wallet had dug into his thigh every morning, a low-grade irritation he had absorbed into his routine without ever deciding to. With the slim RFID wallet, he said, front-pocket carry finally felt natural. His transit card came out on the first try at the turnstile.

That sentence named the goal of the entire project. A wallet is not supposed to be a presence. It is supposed to hold what matters and then step back. The moments when you notice your wallet should be moments of smooth function, not friction. That commuter had articulated the target in one sentence, without knowing it.

Lighter Every Day

Creating the wallet changed Gary’s life in two specific ways, and he is direct about both.

The first is the most immediate. He no longer carries an object that bothers him on his commute. His own wallet is slim, secure, and simple, and that shift has made daily life feel lighter and more intentional. The problem that started on a crowded city bus has been solved, and he experiences that solution every time he reaches into his front pocket without thinking.

The second is harder to quantify. Going from being frustrated by a problem to building a solution that other people use carries its own weight. “Hearing customers say it made their routines easier gives me a sense of purpose and pride I didn’t expect,” Gary says. “It’s proof that small design changes can have a big impact.”

That bus ride home, the coffee in one hand and the backpack on one shoulder and the Metro card jammed in an overstuffed pocket, did not feel like the start of anything. It felt like just another slow evening commute. But the right frustration at the right moment is a blueprint, if you are paying attention.

Gary was paying attention.

Get 20% Off the Minimalist RFID Blocking Wallet

Right now, readers of the Grommet Blog can get 20% off the Minimalist RFID Blocking Wallet through our maker community on Grommet. Just head over to the product page, give it an upvote, and your discount unlocks instantly.

By Greg Rollett, Grommet

This article is presented by Grommet, the leading product discovery platform for new and emerging makers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Check out thousands of products you never knew existed, but soon won’t be able to live without: right here.

The tube of lip balm sitting in the cup holder of a semi-truck looked unremarkable. Standard size: 0.15 ounces. Cool peppermint. USDA-certified organic. Cincinnati-made. But tucked alongside it was a small card, and the card is what matters.

It read: “We believe it’s not only our lips that need to be cared for but the people around us, too. Our hope is that every time you apply your Kind Lips, you’ll remember to say something kind.”

The truck driver’s wife had placed it there herself. She had been married 33 years, and for 30 of them, her marriage had been marked by emotional and sometimes physical abuse. She was not sure a tube of lip balm could change anything. She just knew she had to try.

Three weeks passed without much change. Then something shifted. In week three, her husband came home unusually quiet, a silence that felt, to her, like relief. In week four, he texted her a compliment. It was, she told the man who made the lip balm, the first compliment in over 30 years.

That man is Joshua Neumann. And that phone call, he says, changed the shape of everything he thought he was building.

From the Wrestling Mat to the Open House

Nobody looking at Joshua Neumann in his twenties would have guessed lip balm founder. They saw a state champion wrestler from Ohio who had studied to become a special education teacher, then pivoted into real estate, then climbed to become one of the top agents in his state. He built a team. He landed great clients. He earned more money than he ever imagined growing up.

And then, at the top of it, he felt nothing.

“I realized that success alone didn’t make me happy, and money wasn’t what drove me,” he says. The more he achieved, the more hollow the scoreboard looked. He was, by every external measure, winning. And quietly unraveling.

One afternoon he sat on his couch staring at nothing, asking himself a question he had been avoiding for years: what was his life actually adding to the world? From nowhere he could fully explain, a thought arrived like a whisper. Start a lip balm company.

The idea was, by any rational measure, absurd. He had no chemistry background, no manufacturing contacts, no CPG experience. But that was almost the point. “Because it was so out of left field,” he says, “it felt like it came from somewhere bigger than me.”

He called his mom.

The Dream That Named Everything

She listened to his pitch, told him he would be great at whatever he put his mind to, and said she had to go. He admitted, years later, that he was “a little butthurt.”

But the next morning his phone rang at 6 a.m. His mom had been awake since 3 a.m., too wound up to wait any longer.

She had dreamed. In the dream, Joshua and his sister were children again, and they had gotten into a fight. He had said something unkind. His punishment: to write “The law of kindness is on my lips” fifty times, line after careful line, while his mother stood behind him to make sure he finished every one. And each time he wrote the sentence, she told him, the words “kind” and “lips” lifted off the page.

She said: “I think if you’re going to start a lip balm company, you’re supposed to call it Kind Lips.”

He felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “It was the clearest confirmation I had ever felt.”

Kind Lips was born.

A Gooey Mess and a Better Way

The first prototype was, in Joshua’s words, “honestly terrible.” Soft, mushy, prone to melting almost instantly. He had grown up with chronically dry lips; his mom used to slather them in Vaseline before school because nothing else seemed to work. As an adult, he had tried every lip balm he could find and still applied it twenty times a day without ever feeling like his lips were actually healed.

“Why isn’t there something that actually nourishes your lips so you don’t have to keep reapplying?” It felt obvious once he said it out loud. Making lip balm was not rocket science. Getting it right, though, took batch after batch, ratio adjustments, and a long stretch of trial and error before the formula became something he was willing to share.

“What began as a gooey mess turned into a clean, effective lip balm that actually nourishes your lips and a product that carries a purpose bigger than itself.”

The final formula: 100% USDA-certified organic ingredients, including coconut oil, shea butter, and beeswax. Cool peppermint. Cruelty-free. Made in the USA. A tube so minty they named it twice: Kind Lips Mint Mint.

Kind Lips launched on Grommet in December 2025 and has gathered nearly 200 upvotes from readers who believe in what the brand stands for. Then came the call from Michigan.

The Card in the Cab

When the woman from Michigan first reached out, she framed it as a thank-you. She had found Kind Lips in a boutique. She loved the product. Joshua appreciated the note.

Then she asked if they could get on a phone call.

When she told him the full story, he sat very still. She explained how she had placed the lip balm in her husband’s semi-truck alongside the card that comes with every order: a simple card with a small ask: remember to say something kind. She was not sure it would work. She was not sure anything would work. She just wanted to try.

Three weeks of silence. Then a quiet homecoming. Then a text: the first compliment she could remember in 30 years.

“I’m not an overly emotional person,” Joshua says. “But listening to her, it was the first moment I truly understood how something as small and simple as a lip balm, paired with the intention behind it, could spark real change in someone’s life.”

He has never told that story without it meaning something.

The Classroom and the Calling

Kind Lips has since grown beyond the tube itself. Joshua now runs Kind Lips in the Classroom, a program designed to teach children self-worth, empathy, and emotional resilience before those lessons become urgent. Every session ends with a quote he carries close: “When you know who you are and who you were created to be, you will never want to be anyone else.”

“I don’t want kids to wait until they’re 40, like I did, to finally realize they deserve love, especially from themselves,” he says.

The biggest obstacle in building Kind Lips, he admits, was not sourcing organic ingredients or figuring out packaging or learning manufacturing from scratch. It was internal. “I had created a company built around kindness, yet I struggled to be kind to myself.” That contradiction forced him into what he calls the hardest and most important work of his life: learning to extend to himself the same grace his product asks others to practice.

Something Created with His Own Two Hands

Joshua Neumann was a state champion in a sport built on strength, will, and the ability to hold on when everything in you wants to let go. He became one of the best real estate agents in Ohio. He could have stayed there, comfortable and prosperous and quietly hollow, for the rest of his career.

Instead he sat on a couch one afternoon and listened to a whisper. He called his mom. She dreamed words lifting off a page at 3 a.m. And he built a brand from a gooey kitchen prototype, a card tucked into every order, and a school program teaching children the law of kindness. It has reached classrooms, marriages, and a truck driver’s cup holder in ways he could not have scripted.

“At the end of the day, my favorite part is knowing that something I created with my own two hands, and a whole lot of faith, is out in the world making someone’s day a little kinder.”

That feeling, he says, is priceless.

Get 20% Off Kind Lips

Right now, readers of the Grommet Blog can get 20% off Kind Lips through our maker community on Grommet. Just head over to the product page, give it an upvote, and your discount unlocks instantly.

So we did what we always do: we went looking for the small Makers already solving it. Here’s what we found — organized room by room, so you can start wherever feels most relevant to you.

In the Kitchen

Your kitchen may be the biggest source of daily microplastic exposure. From the surfaces you prep food on to the containers you heat leftovers in, plastic contact with food is surprisingly common — and surprisingly easy to reduce.

Tibo Titanium Cutting Board

Most cutting boards shed microplastics every time a blade scores the surface — even wood ones. Tibo’s titanium board never sheds particles, never warps, and doesn’t harbor bacteria.

Shop Tibo on Grommet →

Microwave-Safe Stainless Steel Container Set

Heating food in plastic is one of the easiest ways microplastics end up in your meals. This stainless steel set is actually microwave-safe — no plastic touching your food, ever.

Shop the Set on Grommet →

Meli Wraps Beeswax Food Wrap

Plastic wrap is designed to touch your food — and shed into it. Meli Wraps replaces it with reusable beeswax wraps that seal naturally with the warmth of your hands, and come in a variety of sizes.

Shop Meli Wraps on Grommet →

Fritaire Self-Cleaning Glass Bowl Air Fryer

Most air fryers cook your food inside plastic or coated baskets. Fritaire replaced them with a borosilicate glass bowl — no coatings, no plastic, no guessing.

Shop Fritaire on Grommet →

In the Laundry Room

Your washing machine may be one of the most significant sources of microplastic pollution in your home. Every cycle that runs synthetic fabrics releases microfibers — and most of them flow straight into the water supply.

PlanetCare Microfiber Filter

Every wash cycle releases thousands of synthetic microfibers straight into waterways. PlanetCare’s filter catches up to 98% of them — automatically, with zero extra effort.

Shop PlanetCare on Grommet →

Lavender Fields Bee Eco Wool Dryer Balls

Dryer sheets are made with synthetic materials that break down onto your clothes and skin over time. These handcrafted wool balls are a natural swap that also cuts drying time.

Shop Dryer Balls on Grommet →

In and On Your Body

Microplastics don’t just enter through food — they can also come from the products you apply directly to your skin and hair, and even from the tools you use to wash with.

Argan Oil Shampoo & Conditioner Bars

Plastic shampoo bottles are single-use by design. These argan oil bars eliminate the bottle entirely — same great results, zero plastic.

Shop the Bars on Grommet →

The Scrubber Pack

Plastic loofahs and synthetic sponges shed microplastics every time you use them — directly onto your skin. The Scrubber Pack replaces them with biodegradable, dual-sided natural scrubbers for face, body, and beyond.

Shop The Scrubber on Grommet →

Sifts Daily Microplastic Supplement

Even with the best swaps, microplastics are hard to avoid entirely. Sifts is a daily fiber supplement designed to support your body’s natural digestion and help reduce exposure from the inside out.

Shop Sifts on Grommet →

Frequently Asked Questions About Microplastics

What exactly is a microplastic?

Microplastics are tiny plastic particles — most smaller than a grain of rice, many invisible to the naked eye — that enter the environment as larger plastics break down over time. They’ve been found in drinking water, produce, seafood, and even human blood. Researchers are still studying the long-term health effects, but reducing exposure where you can is increasingly considered a smart move.

Where do microplastics come from in the home?

Common household sources include plastic cutting boards and food storage containers (especially when heated), synthetic clothing washed in a standard washing machine, plastic wrap and food packaging in direct contact with food, conventional dryer sheets and synthetic laundry products, and plastic loofahs and sponges used on skin.

What is the easiest way to start reducing microplastic exposure?

Start in the kitchen — swap your plastic food storage for stainless steel and ditch plastic wrap for beeswax alternatives. These two changes address some of the most frequent points of contact between plastic and your food. From there, a microfiber filter for your washing machine is one of the highest-impact additions you can make.

Are microplastic-free products more expensive?

Many plastic-free alternatives are comparable in price to what they replace — and some, like dryer balls and shampoo bars, save money over time because they’re reusable or more concentrated. The products featured here are all available at 20% off on Grommet.

Do beeswax wraps really work as well as plastic wrap?

Yes — beeswax wraps like Meli Wraps create a natural seal using the warmth of your hands, and work well for covering bowls, wrapping produce, and storing snacks. They’re not ideal for raw meat, but for everyday food storage they’re a practical, plastic-free alternative.

What is a microfiber filter for a washing machine?

A microfiber filter, like the one made by PlanetCare, attaches to your washing machine and captures synthetic fibers that shed from clothing during each wash cycle. Without a filter, those microfibers flow directly into waterways. PlanetCare’s filter catches up to 98% of them automatically.

Every product on Grommet is here because we believe in it — discovered from small makers building something worth finding.

Want to explore more eco-friendly and sustainable products? Check these out on Grommet.

By Greg Rollett, Grommet

This article is presented by Grommet, the leading product discovery platform for new and emerging makers.

Michael Newman was wedged under a stainless-steel sink, six foot five and two hundred and forty pounds of Appalachian-born mechanical engineer folded into a space never designed for a body his size. The food truck belonged to his wife, a classically trained chef whose turducken taco had been named Ohio’s best in Food Network magazine. The Coop served elevated Americana on the streets of Columbus, Ohio, and Michael was its on-call mechanic. Something upstream of the sink was leaking, and the adjustable wrench in his pocket was the wrong tool for a space that barely had room for his elbow.

He fought the plumbing, gave up, and slid back out. By morning, the kinematics for what would become the patented OMNILOCK wrench were fully formed in his head.

That pursuit, launched on Grommet as the Toler UNION on October 23, 2025, would consume seven years, five tool iterations, four factories, a pandemic, and a tariff scare that nearly sank the project the day after his first backers received their orders.

From Appalachian Hills to the Columbus Idea Foundry

Newman’s biography reads like a set of contradictions that somehow stack up. He grew up a self-described hillbilly in the hills of Appalachian Kentucky. He got his first taste of tinkering hot-rodding electric guitar circuits in his teens, became a semi-professional musician who recorded tracks that charted on college radio with his brother Adam Newman, and worked as a cable guy to pay the bills. Somewhere between the gigs and the service calls, he earned a mechanical engineering degree.

During that program he helped manage The Columbus Idea Foundry, at one point the largest makerspace on the planet. He watched his own name appear on patents and saw products he had designed land on big-box hardware store shelves. Then his wife opened The Coop, and he appointed himself its chief plumber, chief electrician, and chief problem-solver.

It is a résumé built for exactly one kind of invention: the kind that starts under a kitchen sink and ends with a tool that has to satisfy a guitar player’s ear for precision and an Appalachian kid’s respect for things that do not break.

One Wrench, Five Iterations, Four Factories

The first prototype of the OMNILOCK was a 3D print, built in a university manufacturing lab class. It showed Newman that the kinematics were viable, but the plastic could not take the forces a real user would put through it. He had to wait for a steel version before he could verify that the self-adjusting, ratcheting action he had sketched in his head actually worked in the hand.

It did. Newman iterated through five complete versions of the Toler UNION and walked away from four manufacturing partners before finding a factory capable of holding the tolerances his design demanded at a price the market would bear. The inner jaw alone went through rounds of finessing before it would lock and unlock smoothly under rotation while still holding a secure grip.

The finished tool is, in practice, two tools. The UNION splits along a central hinge into a wrench half and a pliers half, so a user can hold a joint steady with one hand and drive it home with the other. It carries a locking D2 tool-steel knife, a 440C stainless wood saw, a D2 metal saw, an awl, and a bit driver. The OMNILOCK adjusts automatically from a quarter inch to three-quarters of an inch, covering both metric and imperial fasteners without a single dial to turn. Newman’s listing on Grommet counts 470-plus task combinations.

A Month from the Factory Floor to a Supply Chain in Flames

Newman was in China finalizing production in December 2019, unaware of what was spreading through the country he was traveling in. By February 2020, he knew. He had backers waiting and capital committed, and no choice but to keep pushing his factory through a pandemic that was flattening supply chains across the world.

Then a supply agent vanished with a significant amount of money and tooling, badly damaging his relationship with the factory. Newman absorbed the loss personally to keep the project moving. The factory eventually came around once they understood he was a fellow victim.

I will never again doubt my ability to endure.

Michael Newman

On April 1, 2025, after more than ten thousand Indiegogo backers had waited through years of delays, the first UNION shipments were fulfilled. On April 2, the United States announced new tariffs on tools already on the water, a move that would have bankrupted the company the moment its cargo cleared port. A frantic scramble ended with a creative stay inside a bonded warehouse, and the official landing happened on the exact day the tariffs were first paused. “It was a nail biter,” Newman says, “to say the least.”

The Weekend at Blade Show

Seven years earlier, with a week-old prototype in hand, Newman had walked into the Blade Show in Atlanta and casually asked people if they wanted to see something cool. He spent the weekend in the company of the most respected multi-tool designers in the industry. One of them, the creator of what Newman still considers the most innovative multi-tool ever made, sought him out unprompted.

By weekend’s end, that designer had told Newman he considered him part of a rarefied group of peers, a set that now totaled three people, Blade Show legend included.

A Seventeen-Year-Old and a Dorm Full of Repairs

Of the thousands of pieces of feedback Newman has received, one still gets to him. A seventeen-year-old high-school robotics competitor posted a YouTube review of the UNION, parsing the finer design points with a fluency Newman recognized immediately. The kid was headed to engineering school and wrote as if Newman had become a model for the engineer he wanted to be.

Years later, that same young man reached out again. The UNION had become the de facto repair kit for his entire college dorm. “It felt good to know I was maybe inspiring someone like who I used to be,” Newman says.

What the UNION Is a Down Payment On

Newman is careful about the future he is chasing, because it is, as he puts it, “ridiculously self-aggrandizing.” He believes the right technological advancements are the greatest engines of social change, and he wants the UNION to eventually fund his work on point-of-place manufacturing and individual robotic agriculture, where families harvest their own energy, grow their own food, and manufacture the goods they need on demand from digital designs shared freely.

In the near term, the UNION is a sandbox for modules. The central hinge accepts swap-in halves: a bushcraft setup for a day in the woods, an electrician module for a service call. The wrench half stays; the other evolves with the day ahead of you.

For now, the first UNION sits in glove boxes, emergency kits, bicycle saddlebags, Air Force hangars, and one Ohio food truck where the entire idea started. The multi-tool that was supposed to replace a drawer has, in Newman’s own words, replaced the moment of defeat that used to come with realizing you brought the wrong tool.

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By Greg Rollett, Grommet

This article is presented by Grommet, the leading product discovery platform for new and emerging makers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Check out thousands of products you never knew existed, but soon won’t be able to live without, right here.

The Coconut Curry That Started It All

Spring 2020. A kitchen in Chicago. A toddler in a high chair, and a bowl that by every conventional rule had no business being there: coconut shrimp curry, fragrant with lime and ginger, still warm from the stove. The baby was not yet a year old. Her mother, Erica Bethe Levin, had been standing at the counter thinking about her first child, a son she loved fiercely and whose taste buds she had, she was convinced, quietly ruined with years of dutiful, pale, unseasoned purées.

This time would be different. Erica set the bowl down, handed over a spoon, and watched her daughter devour it.

“There has to be a better way to feed babies. Why isn’t anyone giving parents real, globally-inspired meals that haven’t been sanitized of allergens?”Erica Bethe Levin, Founder of Globowl

That night in quarantine, with takeout menus piled by the door and the world shrunk down to one kitchen, Erica realized she had been handed a second chance. And she was not going to waste it.

Before the Jars

Erica’s path to a glass jar of Veggie Tikka Masala starts, implausibly, at a Broadway dinner table called Sardi’s. She grew up believing she would be belting out Annie Get Your Gun. She majored in theatre, minored in Italian, and is a bundle of contradictions: a Jewish father, an Italian mother, a professional food writer who will not touch anything white and creamy, a karaoke partner whose entire catalog is Billy Joel, Elton John, Lady Gaga, and showtunes.

She is also, as she puts it, “full-blown OCD,” which she considers an asset. “My attention to detail and relentless drive make me a better entrepreneur,” she says. “My neuroses aren’t just manageable; they’re a competitive advantage.”

Instead of Broadway, she took a different stage. At twenty-four, she founded Chicago’s first digital-only publication for women. She was a founding employee of a restaurant tech startup backed by one of Uber’s co-founders, later acquired by American Express. She once uprooted her life with a seven-year-old and a four-year-old at home to spend two months in London competing on a Gordon Ramsay TV show alongside Lisa Vanderpump, because, as she says, she believes in betting big on yourself.

The through-line, she says, was storytelling, risk-taking, and feeding people. Through words, through tech, and eventually through tiny jars of Tikka Masala.

A Michelin Kitchen After Hours

The first Globowl prototype was not a factory run. It was Erica, alone, with a $40 Amazon canner, a stack of mason jars from Target, and a dream. She could seal twelve jars at a time. Each little pop of the lid felt, she says, “so satisfying.”

Twelve-at-a-time was fine until it wasn’t. When street festivals started asking for Globowl, she needed real volume and real equipment. A dear friend, a Chicago chef with a James Beard Award to her name, handed over the keys to her downtown restaurant. Erica would show up before service, pots and produce in hand, and cook and can her babies’ first meals in the same kitchen where, hours later, a Michelin-starred dinner would be plated.

“Nothing says startup hustle,” she laughs, “like making baby food where a chef preps dinner.”

The recipes have grown up since. Today Globowl works with a co-manufacturer on sleek glass jars with gold lids and labels that tell the story of each dish. But the bones of that rustic, scrappy, post-service origin are all still there. And one of the recipes carries an unexpected creative note in its DNA: Gordon Ramsay, tasting an early version of the Baby Spice Bean Bowl, told her it was a little too acidic, because Globowl was relying on natural acids rather than preservatives. She adjusted. He was, to her slight irritation and total delight, right.

The First Two Yeses

Raising capital as a woman, Erica says bluntly, is a master class in rejection. Ninety-eight percent of venture dollars still go elsewhere. Convincing a co-manufacturer to take on a tiny baby-food brand is a second master class. Doing both at the same time is, she says, its own kind of education.

The first yes came from her husband. She told him this would cost their savings, that she would be on the road constantly, that she needed him all-in. He did not flinch. “I’m your partner,” he told her, “I’ll hold down the fort.”

“I’m your partner, I’ll hold down the fort.”

The second yes came from a mentor she describes as one of the most treasured people in her life, who did not just say she believed in Globowl but proved it by sending links to co-manufacturers and connecting her with CPG operators at every turn. Those two yeses, Erica says, felt like “permission to stop dreaming and start building.”

She would need that confidence later. In the early days of the company, a first business partner stole from Globowl and left Erica to pick up the pieces. That she not only survived that betrayal but built the brand into what it is today on her own remains, she says, one of the most validating stretches of her life.

Raising a Generation, One Spoon at a Time

Globowl is built on a scientific premise as much as a cultural one. Around the time Erica was feeding her daughter that first coconut curry, the USDA released its first-ever pediatric feeding guidelines. Two findings jumped out: babies have a “flavor window” between roughly four and eighteen months during which diet diversity most strongly shapes their lifetime palate, and early, repeated exposure to common allergens can significantly reduce the risk of lifelong food allergies.

That, Erica realized, was not mom-gut instinct. That was science, medicine, and research. Globowl was born.

The six-bowl Around the World Variety Pack launched on Grommet on October 30, 2025. Baby Bibimbap. Yaya’s Medi-Bowl. Mini-Strone. Veggie Tikka Masala. Pad Thai for Tots. Baby Spice’s Bean Bowl. Ninety percent or more certified organic, pediatrician and chef approved, recyclable glass jars.

The early validation did not, Erica notes, come from parents of babies. It came from grandparents. From parents of older kids. “I wish this had existed when my babies were little,” they kept telling her. That was the lightbulb. Globowl was not just solving a problem she had. It was solving one that generations of families had quietly carried.

What She’s Really Building

Ask Erica what success looks like for Globowl and she will not lead with revenue. “By exposing children to diversity from their very first bites, we’re not just shaping adventurous eaters,” she says. “We’re raising a generation that will grow up tolerant, accepting, and curious about all people, cultures, and places.” Food, she believes, becomes a child’s first passport.

That is a big claim to pack into a glass jar of chickpea stew. But spend five minutes with Erica and you understand she is not making baby food. She is building a mission, in glass, not plastic; with flavor, not blandness; with inclusion, not limitation.

On the hard days, the ones with rejection emails and supply headaches and the familiar grind of being a founder, she thinks about her own kids. She thinks about the picky eater she created and the adventurous one she did not. She thinks about all the other parents standing in their own kitchens, trying to do one small thing right for the next generation.

And she gets back to work.

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Click here to meet Erica, upvote Globowl, and get 20% off your order

By Greg Rollett, Grommet

This article is presented by Grommet, the leading product discovery platform for new and emerging makers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Check out thousands of products you never knew existed, but soon won’t be able to live without, right here.

It was late. The workday had ended hours earlier, and Ewelina Aiossa was sitting at her vanity in Ramsey, New Jersey, staring at two small groupings of bottles. On one side sat the medical-grade formulas she had spent her corporate career helping to shape, the ones she knew worked. On the other side sat the clean, plant-based oils and serums she actually wanted to use, the ones that smelled beautiful and felt indulgent, but barely moved the needle on her skin. That night, she did what most of us have quietly done at one point or another. She applied both. She layered them, one on top of the other, hoping, in her own words, that “they’d cancel each other out.”

They did not. What they did, instead, was surface the frustration that had been building in her for years.

The Vanity, The Two Jars, and the Cancellation Theory

Ewelina is not the kind of person who arrives at a skincare revelation by accident. Before she became a maker, she was a corporate beauty executive, shaping strategy, leading marketing teams, and building global brands for some of the industry’s biggest players, including the world’s number-one medical-grade skincare brand. She had sat in the rooms. She had listened to the dermatologists. She had watched consumers chase the same elusive thing she was chasing herself.

I felt boxed in. The medical-grade products I had access to as a beauty executive worked, but they were often harsh, overloaded with synthetics, and didn’t feel good to use. On the flip side, many ‘clean’ or natural products looked beautiful on a shelf but underdelivered on performance.Ewelina Aiossa, founder of TOPICAL SKIN

The cancellation-theory night was not the start of TOPICAL SKIN, but it was the moment the gap between the two sides of her vanity stopped being a professional observation and became a personal provocation. She thought, she recalls, “there has to be a better way. Why couldn’t I have a single product that delivered dermatologist-level efficacy but with clean, safe, plant-based ingredients I felt good about putting on my skin?” That was the seed.

A Corporate Exec With a Private Conviction

What surprises people about Ewelina’s background is how much of the beauty industry she had already seen before she decided to build something of her own. She started out at a beauty contract manufacturer and private label company, the kind of behind-the-scenes operation where the bones of the industry are built. She moved through the professional channel. She eventually led marketing for some of the biggest names in the business. She presented concepts to physician advisory board members and high-level executives. She speaks, even now, with the careful vocabulary of someone who knows a clinical study from a claim.

All of which is to say, when she decided to leave the safety of the corporate world, she did not do so naively. She did it because she had spent enough time inside the system to see exactly where its seams were.

Her observation, distilled, is simple. Modern skin is not coping with modern life. Pollution, blue light, lack of sleep, emotional fatigue, all of it shows up on the face. Industry-speak calls this collection of external stressors the exposome, and most clean beauty products were never designed to defend against it. So Ewelina built a technology that was.

Ten Oils, One Bottle

She calls it Exposome Defense Technology, and it sits at the heart of Phyto AOX Facial Oil N°10. The N°10 in the name is not a number for the sake of elegance. It refers, literally, to the ten globally sourced oils inside the bottle, including holy basil, frankincense, baobab, bakuchiol, rosehip, and tsubaki. Those oils are stabilized by an antioxidant network of lutein, quercetin, and green tea polyphenols, and rounded out by adaptogenic extracts of rosemary, turmeric, and chamomile.

The first prototype was not that. The first prototype was simpler, a smaller botanical blend focused on a handful of oils known for their antioxidant and barrier-supporting properties. The texture, she says, felt “less refined.” Through an iterative process involving multiple reformulations and stability testing, she worked closely with chemists to perfect the balance, tuning for absorption, glow, and the signature silky finish. Exposome Defense Technology was layered in afterward, once she was confident the sensory experience held up.

I had to overcome issues around transparency, the risk of greenwashing, and finding trusted partners who could help create a product that truly delivered on its promises.

The finished oil is the rare thing Ewelina had been looking for at her own vanity. A single bottle that works like the medical-grade products she had spent her career respecting, and feels like the clean, luxurious oils she had always wanted to reach for.

The Neighbor, the Rash, and the Two-Day Turnaround

The first person outside her home to test it was her neighbor, a patient prototype-taker who was willing to live with imperfect early versions. She loved the texture. She loved the way the oil softened fine lines and improved radiance. Then something happened that turned a quiet endorsement into a story Ewelina still repeats.

Her neighbor developed a stubborn rash on her neck, caused by a reaction to an oral medication. Hydrocortisone, the usual default, did not help. Out of options and running low on trust in the cabinet, she kept applying the face oil, working whatever she had left across her face, neck, and chest. Within two days, the rash had visibly minimized.

“She was so impressed that she asked for more samples and couldn’t wait for the product to be commercialized,” Ewelina remembers. It was the kind of result that you cannot plan for in a stability test. It was the product telling its own story.

A Husband Who Saw It First

Before the neighbor, before the reformulations, before TOPICAL SKIN had a name, there was one person who believed. Her husband traveled with her to industry conferences and tradeshows. He listened to her talk about formulas, technologies, clinical studies, and ingredients. He watched her present concepts to physician advisory boards.

He saw in me what I had not yet seen myself, a gifted, passionate skincare geek capable of creating award-winning formulas and building a brand based on deep insights.Ewelina Aiossa

That belief, she says, propelled the vision forward.

What Success Looks Like Now

TOPICAL SKIN launched on Grommet on October 16, 2025. Ewelina defines success as a shift in how customers relate to their own skin, a trust built through transparency and performance, and the slow construction of a community that refuses to choose between clean and clinical. On the hard days, she leans on her immediate family and on the feedback that lands in her inbox at exactly the right moment.

She will tell you that the layering episode at her vanity was not really about two jars. It was about refusing to accept a trade-off the industry had been selling for decades. Phyto AOX Facial Oil N°10 is what happens when someone with a corporate executive’s discipline and a maker’s stubbornness finally stops accepting it.

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Upvote Phyto AOX Facial Oil N°10, and get 20% off →

By Greg Rollett, Grommet

This article is presented by Grommet, the leading product discovery platform for new and emerging makers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Check out thousands of products you never knew existed, but soon won’t be able to live without, right here.

It was a piece of string. That was it. A shaman tied it around Roland Szegi’s wrist and said three words: “Remember to breathe.”

Roland’s first reaction was skepticism. Breathing was something he had been doing instinctively all his life. Why would he need a reminder for the most basic function his body already performed on its own? He thanked the shaman, wore the string, and went home to Los Angeles.

But the string did something strange. Every time his eyes drifted to his wrist during a stressful meeting or a late-night scroll through his phone, he paused. His shoulders dropped half an inch. He took one slow, deliberate breath. And for a few seconds, the noise in his head went quiet.

“I questioned the necessity of such a reminder, considering it was something I had been doing instinctively all my life.”Roland Szegi, Creator of Breathelet OneFit

That string eventually frayed and fell off. But the idea it left behind did not. Roland’s Breathelet OneFit, now live on Grommet with 214 upvotes, is the product that grew from that single piece of string: a sleek, adjustable bracelet that delivers gentle vibration cues at unpredictable intervals throughout the day, nudging the wearer to pause, breathe, and reset. No app. No screen. No charger anxiety. Just a quiet tap on the wrist when you need it most.

The Book That Changed Everything

The shaman planted the seed, but it was a book that watered it. Roland picked up James Nestor’s Breath and found himself underlining nearly every page. Shallow chest breaths. Mouth breathing through the night. Chronic, low-grade suffocation disguised as a normal Tuesday. He recognized himself in those pages.

“Reading James Nestor’s Breath opened my eyes to the significance of mindful breathing, the art of proper inhalation, and the alarming absence of it in our daily routines.”

Then came his life coach. She recommended a simple intervention: throughout the day, pause and direct your focus toward your breath. The prescription was elegant. The problem was remembering to follow it.

From String to Circuitry

Roland tried phone alarms. Sticky notes. Meditation apps that sent push notifications, which struck him as absurd: the device causing his stress was now supposed to cure it.

He kept circling back to the shaman’s string. What if the solution was that simple? Not another app, but a physical object on his body that could quietly interrupt the autopilot?

“The Breathelet was born: a stylish piece of accessory that discreetly prompts you to pause and breathe.”

The first Breathelet was rough. Roland needed a vibration motor small enough for a bracelet, a timer unpredictable enough to feel organic, and a design clean enough that someone would wear it daily. The pattern he settled on fires once in the morning after you unplug it, then at random intervals every 90 to 150 minutes. You never know when the next nudge is coming, which is precisely the point.

The string-adjustable fit system is a quiet nod to where it all began. You pull the cord, set it to your wrist, and hook it in place. Still a string on your wrist. Just one with a small motor and a big idea behind it.

We asked Roland to share the rest of his story in his own words.

What was your life like before you embarked on this entrepreneurial journey?

I was living in chronic stress and anxiety driven by constant mental busyness. My nervous system was always running hot, and I had no reliable way to interrupt the cycle. I needed something elegant, something non-digital, to remind myself to pause. But nothing like that existed. Everything on the market either required a phone, came with a subscription, or looked like a medical device.

Walk us through your first prototype.

I went through dozens of iterations trying to get the balance right between size, vibration strength, battery life, and aesthetics. Early versions were bulky. Some vibrated too aggressively. Others were so subtle you could not feel them through a sleeve.

The breakthrough came when I stopped trying to make a gadget and started trying to make a piece of jewelry that happened to have a purpose.

What was the biggest challenge in bringing this product to market?

Convincing people that they needed a reminder to breathe. It sounds absurd when you say it out loud. Everyone breathes. But the distinction between unconscious, shallow breathing and intentional, mindful breathing is the distinction between surviving your day and actually being present for it.

Finding the right motor and materials for water resistance while keeping the price accessible took months. I refused to ship something that felt disposable.

Who were the first people to truly believe in your idea?

My life coach was the first. She had seen the problem firsthand: clients who knew breathing exercises could help their anxiety but forgot to do them the moment they walked out of a session. When I showed her the prototype, she immediately understood.

After that, it was the wellness circles in Los Angeles. They were already doing breathwork, already reading Nestor. For them, Breathelet filled a gap they could articulate: they knew what to do, they just needed a nudge to do it.

What does success look like to you?

True success is measured by the quiet, everyday moments when someone pauses, takes a breath, and feels a genuine shift in their nervous system. Not downloads. Not engagement metrics. A shift in someone’s shoulders.

If Breathelet helps normalize mindful pauses and makes self-regulation feel accessible rather than aspirational, that is a meaningful win.

Can you share a piece of customer feedback that has stayed with you?

People keep telling me they did not realize how rarely they paused during the day until the bracelet vibrated and caught them mid-spiral. “I was three hours into a work block and had not taken a single conscious breath.” That moment of recognition is exactly what Breathelet was designed to create.

Several customers now associate the vibration with a feeling of safety. The bracelet has become their signal that it is okay to slow down, even for ten seconds.

What does it mean to you to be part of a community like Grommet?

Grommet understands that a product is only as powerful as the story behind it. On a larger marketplace, Breathelet would be reduced to a feature list and a price point. Here, the story of the shaman’s string, the life coach, the book that changed my perspective: all of that gets to live alongside the product.

Breathelet was never designed to go viral. It was designed to help one person at a time remember to breathe.

What keeps you motivated on the hard days?

Creating Breathelet required me to slow down, listen closely to my own needs, and trust simplicity over complexity. That shift has influenced not only how I manage stress, but how I approach work, relationships, and decision-making.

Breathelet has transformed anxiety from something I tried to suppress into a signal to pause and reconnect. Knowing that something born from my own struggle can help people feel calmer is what keeps me going when the doubt piles up.

The shaman’s string frayed. The idea did not. And every 90 to 150 minutes, on wrists around the country, a small motor hums to life, and someone’s shoulders drop half an inch, and the noise goes quiet for just long enough to matter.

Get 20% Off Breathelet OneFit

Right now, readers of the Grommet Blog can get 20% off Breathelet OneFit through our maker community on Grommet. Just head over to the product page, give it an upvote, and your discount unlocks instantly.

Check out the Breathelet & Get 20% Off →

By Greg Rollett, Grommet

This article is presented by Grommet, the leading product discovery platform for new and emerging makers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Check out thousands of products you never knew existed, but soon won’t be able to live without, right here.

The morning sun hits the Himalayan ridge at a particular angle, one that makes you forget the elephant sitting on your chest from the altitude. Hang Ly was on day six of her seven-day trek to Everest Base Camp when she stopped to repack her backpack.

She’d been traveling light for years. A medical doctor from Foothill Ranch, California, she crossed continents with nothing but a carry-on or a small backpack. No checked luggage. No excess. But that morning, somewhere in the Himalayas, she unzipped her toiletry bag and found a sticky mess. Bottles had leaked. Moisture had seeped into everything.

She repacked, dried what she could, and kept hiking.

That night, near the summit, surrounded by the world’s four highest peaks, something crystallized. “Somewhere between exhaustion and exhilaration, the idea came to me.”

Solid, single-use skincare. Lightweight. Spill-proof. Effortless to pack. Something that could glide through TSA and across continents without compromising your skin.

From Saigon to Summit

If you met Hang, you might assume she was born in the United States. She wasn’t. She’s a Vietnam War refugee who came to America with her mother and seven siblings, part of one of the largest refugee waves in the country’s history. The family had nothing. They built a life through resilience and grit.

Hang became a medical doctor. She still practices today. She still wakes up dedicated to improving people’s well-being. That commitment didn’t disappear when she decided to become a Maker. It transformed.

Her problem was almost absurdly specific, which meant it was actually universal. She loved exploring the world. Trekking. Climbing. Caving. Kayaking. But the logistics of skincare were brutal. Liquids are heavy. They leak. They require decanting into smaller bottles at airports. You pay a premium for tiny sizes. And if you’re hiking for seven days at altitude, every ounce counts.

After the Himalayas, she had the idea. What she didn’t have was a roadmap.

Paper-thin and impossible

Her first concept was elegant on paper: a facial cleanser in paper-thin solid sheets. Lightweight. Novel. Direct.

Impossible to manufacture.

She walked the aisles of multiple trade shows hunting for manufacturers who could execute her vision. She called dozens of companies. She heard “no” more times than she could count. There were no mentors guiding her through the process, no instruction manual. Just determination and the memory of that sticky morning in the Himalayas.

The sheets wouldn’t work, so she pivoted. What about solid beads instead? Easier to produce. Still lightweight. Still elegant. Still something you could toss in a backpack and forget about. Every “no” pushed her to problem-solve differently, and the final product was stronger for it.

A Galentine’s dinner and a breakthrough

She had just flown back from yet another trade show, barely had time to catch her breath, when she stopped by a Galentine’s Day dinner with her rock climbing friends.

These were fierce, adventurous people. She told them about the concept. They weren’t polite. They weren’t indulgent. They were ecstatic! They immediately recognized it as something they needed for their own expeditions. That was the first time Hang realized her idea wasn’t just a solution for her. It was something that could genuinely make a difference for anyone who lives a life of adventure.

Wild Vie WanderLuxe

Fast forward to October 2025. Hang launched Wild Vie WanderLuxe on Grommet. It’s a solid bead moisturizer formulated with ceramides, macadamia seed oil, and sunflower seed oil. Fragrance-free. Paraben-free. Sulfate-free. Cruelty-free. TSA-friendly. Recyclable. Made in Korea. The product has 229 upvotes and a perfect 5-star rating from customers who have taken it to Guatemala, through airport security, and into the depths of one of the world’s largest caves.

In French, “Vie” means life. The name carries weight.

The first real customer feedback that stayed with Hang came from a woman on a four-day caving expedition in Son Doong Cave, Vietnam. She had tossed WanderLuxe into her backpack, forgot about it, and was amazed. It crossed TSA without a problem. It didn’t leak. It stayed lightweight. And it kept her skin nourished throughout those long, humid days underground. Hearing how the product enhanced someone else’s adventure was, for Hang, everything.

The climb continues

Hang could have accepted the status quo. Could have bought travel-sized bottles at the airport. Could have checked a bag. Instead, she remembered that morning on the Himalayan ridge when the bottles leaked, and she thought: there has to be a better way.

“As a refugee who built a life through resilience and grit, challenges are just part of the climb,” she says. “I think back to that moment in the Himalayas. Exhausted but inspired. Every setback now feels like another step toward creating something that helps others feel empowered, free, and ready for their own adventures.”

That’s what Wild Vie is, in the end. Not just skincare. A reminder that the best innovations come from lived experience, from a woman who carried the weight of her family’s journey across continents and up the side of a mountain, and came back down with a better idea.

Get 20% Off Wild Vie WanderLuxe

Right now, readers of the Grommet Blog can get 20% off Wild Vie WanderLuxe through our maker community on Grommet. Just head over to the product page, give it an upvote, and your discount unlocks instantly.

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