Our Story

The crystals in Glacce bottles have been in the earth for millions of years. The company started with a dream in 2015. Sharon Leslie woke up and saw the whole thing.

Two Friends from New Orleans

Sharon Leslie and Julia Schoen met in kindergarten in New Orleans. The kind of friendship where you finish each other's sentences at six and still call without texting first at twenty-five. By then, they were both in Colorado with no plan to start a company.

Then Sharon dreamed about crystals. A glass water bottle with a real crystal inside it. She called Julia the next morning. Julia said yes. That was all the due diligence they needed.

The Basement

The first Glacce bottles were assembled by hand in a basement apartment. Sharon and Julia sourced crystals from miners in Arkansas and Brazil, fitted them in borosilicate glass and stainless steel. No glue. Every bottle held together mechanically, every crystal unique, shaped by geology.

They needed help. Sharon's solution was unconventional: she recruited Tinder dates. Guys would come over expecting dinner and assemble crystal water bottles over cheap beer instead. It worked. Some of those dates became repeat volunteers.

A shipping facility? Also secured through Tinder. Sharon swiped right on someone who worked in logistics. The Glacce supply chain was, for a while, built entirely on dating apps and goodwill.

The Phone Started Ringing

The bottles were striking: cylinders of glass and stainless steel around a raw crystal obelisk, visible through the water. No two stones looked alike. People noticed.

BuzzFeed wrote about them. Then Vice. Then The Guardian, Elle UK, and PureWow. Each piece brought orders they weren't ready for.

Then came the call from Free People. A wholesale order from a national retailer. Sharon and Julia were still assembling bottles in a basement. They figured it out.

Bon Appetit sent a writer to try one for a month. The piece was honest, funny, skeptical. It introduced Glacce to readers who would never walk into a crystal shop. That was the point. The bottles were for people who like beautiful objects, not people who need convincing.

Goop and the Celebrities

Goop called Glacce "the gold standard" of crystal water bottles. For a brand that started with Tinder dates and basement assembly, this meant something. The bottles had gone from curiosity to covetable.

Then the paparazzi photos started. Victoria Beckham carrying a Glacce bottle. Katy Perry with one at the studio. Adele spotted with hers. Nobody asked them to. They bought the bottles because they liked them.

Sharon explained it once: "When you recognize something beautiful, when you experience awe, you're automatically forced into the present moment." The bottle interrupts your autopilot. You see the crystal through the glass, and for half a second, you're looking at something the earth made.

Beauty Does the Work

A crystal in your water bottle is not medicine. We've never claimed otherwise.

But picking up something beautiful before you drink slows you down. You notice the weight of the glass, the color of the stone, the light moving through water. That pause is worth something.

Every crystal in a Glacce bottle is genuine, sourced from mines in Arkansas and Brazil. Each one is unique. The bottles are borosilicate glass and stainless steel. No plastic, no glue, no shortcuts. For details on materials, crystal care, and construction, see our common questions page.

Where We Are Now

Glacce started as a crystal water bottle company. The questions shifted. Less "where can I buy one?" and more "which crystal is right for me?" and "what does the research actually say?"

So we built Of Quartz, a journal covering crystals, wellness practices, and the long history of humans being drawn to stones. No hype. Lots of specifics.

The bottles are still available in the collection. Still glass, still stainless steel, still built around one-of-a-kind crystals — assembled with the same care Sharon and Julia put into those first basement prototypes. The Tinder dates have moved on.

Two friends from New Orleans who had a strange idea and followed it. Ten years later, the crystals are still beautiful. The water still tastes like water. That is enough.