About Coffee Wear

Greetings,

My name is Donna McGee and my daughter is Emily Camargo. We live in the mountains of western Virginia. How did we get started with Coffee Wear?

Simple. My son-in-law, Daniel, a native of Mexico came back from a business trip to Chiapas, Mexico bearing a few gifts. He gave to both Emily and I a gift box set of jewelry, necklace and earrings made of colorful beads and COFFEE BEANS. Em and I looked at each other and both said, “We can so do this.”

So, for fun, we bought a small spool of beading wire, a package of plastic beads and a small hand drilling tool (something like a screwdriver) from a local craft store and started to make holes in a handful of coffee beans. It was fun, but the resulting necklaces were neither sturdy nor pretty. Then we went to a local beading store to learn some of the finer techniques of beading. I must say, Emily just dove into the project letting loose her creativity.

After a while, we decided to try to sell our “Coffee Wear” to some of our local coffee shops and retail stores. In two weeks we found three cafes that offered to sell our jewelry on consignment (Black Water Loft Cafe, Cafe del Sol and The Coffee Depot) and one fair trade shop that bought from us directly (Home Body).

We were ecstatic! How great! Margaret, the owner of the fair trade shop asked us if our coffee beans were fair trade and organic certified. She had to explain to us what that meant. We told her that we will consider making all of our products from fair trade organic beans even though the cost of the beans was higher than the well known brands you can get in the local grocery store.

After that we learned a lot about fair trade and now we whole-heartedly support this global effort. All of our coffee beans come from fair trade sources from around the world, supplied to us from The Coffee Depot in Christiansburg, Virginia.

So, Emily and I encourage you as coffee shop owners, retailers, global citizens, and of course, coffee lovers to enjoy our coffee bean jewelry and gifts.