freebeacon.com The Washington Democrat spent a summer biking to Ecuador, even though she said she had to juggle three jobs to afford tuition
Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a self-styled “working class” Washington Democrat, claims she worked in an “iPhone case factory” in college to pay her tuition after her father cut her off because she wouldn’t go to church. But the shop was actually a boutique artisanal workshop that made wooden, hand-crafted cases, according to her former roommate.
Gluesenkamp Perez has repeatedly said she juggled the “factory” gig alongside her jobs as a nanny and a barista while attending Reed College, an elite and expensive private school in Portland, Ore. But no major phone case manufacturers operated in the area at the time—as is the case today, they are mostly in China.
“I worked three jobs and paid for Reed by the credit hour; working as a nanny, barista, and in an iPhone case factory,” she told Reed Magazine in 2023. “I did piecework,” she told Obama operative David Axelrod on his podcast in 2024. “I worked in a factory that made iPhone cases … and I was also … running the bike co-op.”
The workplace she described is Grove, a small Portland-based company producing delicate bamboo iPhone cases, according to Isaac Eger, Gluesenkamp Perez’s former roommate. Speaking on the Jan. 29 episode of his podcast, COEXIST Inc., Eger, a critic of Gluesenkamp Perez, said she began working at the shop—which later rebranded as Grovemade—around 2010 or 2011, three to four years after enrolling at Reed. Founded in 2009, Grove initially produced bamboo iPhone cases, though it has since stopped making the cases in lieu of other artisanal products like laptop stands, keyboard trays, and desks.
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