Seattle, Washington · Est. 2001 · Founded by Lee Rhodes
In 1995, Lee Rhodes was in the middle of chemotherapy for lung cancer when she dropped a tea light into a small hand-blown glass vessel and watched it glow. She thought: there must be a way to marry this light with something larger. She was right. Founded in Seattle in 2001, Glassybaby makes hand-blown glass votives and drinkware in over 400 colors -- each one different, each one named -- and has donated over $10 million to organizations that help people, animals, and the planet heal.
Lee Rhodes was 38 years old, a mother of three young children, and fighting lung cancer for the third time when she had the idea that would change everything. Sitting in chemotherapy rooms, she noticed that some of the other patients couldn't finish their treatment -- not because of the illness, but because they couldn't afford the bus fare to get there, or childcare, or a warm meal. She wanted to do something about that. Then one evening she dropped a tea light into a small hand-blown glass vessel on her kitchen island and watched the light dance inside the color. Something shifted.
She started selling the votives out of her garage in 1998, hiring local glassblowers from Seattle's remarkable glassblowing community -- a city shaped by Dale Chihuly and the Pilchuck School. She incorporated Glassybaby in 2001 with a model that made investors laugh: one product, handmade, expensive, and with 10% of revenue given away to charity from day one. Martha Stewart received a glassybaby as a gift in 2005 and invited Lee on her show. Sales tripled overnight. Jeff Bezos bought a stake in the company in 2009. Today Glassybaby has donated over $10 million to more than 900 nonprofits.
Every glassybaby is hand-blown by a team of three to six glassblowers using colored glass rods derived from natural pigments, shaped through three furnaces, and finished by hand. Each one has a name -- bestowed by Lee herself -- and each one is slightly different from every other, because that is the nature of something made by hand. On a registry, a glassybaby is not a candle holder. It is a language -- a way of saying something when words aren't quite enough.
