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.
“This is part of her lore,” Eger said on his podcast. “She’s definitely cosplaying as a poor person.” A fellow Reed alumnus, Daniel Boguslaw, added, “which never happened at Reed.”
Eger says that the Gluesenkamp Perez of today, who he says is unrecognizable from the woman he knew, “called it an iPhone case factory … They made [the wooden cases] by hand—so not machinery.”
Gluesenkamp Perez did not respond to a request for comment. Eger declined to comment.
Grove was an artisanal workshop founded by two University of Oregon graduates that brought “tech precision and old-fashioned craftsmanship to an imperfect material: wood,” according to a 2011 Oregonian profile of founders Ken Tomita and Joe Mansfield. (Mansfield has since moved to New Zealand’s South Island where he makes “mobile saunas.”) Making the iPhone cases involved shaving bamboo into thin sheets, hand-sanding rough patches, etching designs—existing ones or customized—and applying four coats of oil by hand, waiting eight hours between each layer. Additional handwork included gluing rubber bumpers inside the cases and fitting thin wooden bands around the bezel edge.
Tomita and Mansfield, who said they had no “formal experience,” told the Oregonian they were forced to “learn and create our own techniques and procedures from the ground up.”
Grovemade and its cofounders did not respond to a request for comment.
The operation bore little resemblance to a factory, particularly when Gluesenkamp Perez would have worked there. During Grovemade’s early stages, Tomita’s mother “opened up her living room as the staging area for finishing the products” and “personally hand-oiled” each case, according to the company’s website. Eger, who lived with the congresswoman for about a year, said the work “was initially done in someone’s basement in someone’s house.”
By 2011, the company had grown to about 10 employees—”including their friends and relatives”—half of whom worked full-time, the Oregonian reported. The staff included college interns and Reed graduates, including Dano Wall—now a New York-based fintech executive—whom Eger described as a “buddy” who knew Gluesenkamp Perez. Wall served as Grovemade’s production manager from June 2010 to March 2013, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Wall did not respond to a request for comment.
Around that time, the company routinely posted photos to Facebook of its employees working in what it called the “Grove Workshop.” Gluesenkamp Perez appears in one Facebook post: a September 2011 photo in which she poses behind one of the company’s bamboo MacBook cases. The photo was part of a company video promoting the cases titled “Introducing Grove Bamboo Backs.” Gluesenkamp Perez smiles and winks while showing off the case. The photo also appeared in a November 2011 blog post from Better Living Through Design advertising the case. An Instagram post, meanwhile, shows Gluesenkamp Perez sitting in shorts and flip flops as she appears to be “sanding” a case by hand.
The actual nature of Gluesenkamp Perez’s “iPhone case factory” is the latest intrusion of reality into her repeated assertion that she is the product of a hardscrabble “working class” upbringing. She is the daughter of a college-educated engineer, graduated from a prestigious small liberal arts college with a degree in economics, and thrived—and met her husband—in Portland’s “hipster artisan” scene, where college-educated elites ply artisan trades.
While Gluesenkamp Perez said her father cut off financial support during college after she stopped attending church, she has no student loan debt, according to the financial statements she’s filed as a political candidate, though tuition alone at Reed at the time she attended—not including living expenses—was about $39,000 a year.
Eger says she was not working a legitimate job for most of her time at Reed—and that the jobs she had couldn’t have come close to paying Reed’s giant tuition bills (not to mention living expenses).
Furthermore, her father—apparently moving past his objections to her lack of faith—helped finance Gluesenkamp Perez’s first home just two years after she graduated. And while she has portrayed herself as a hands-on auto shop owner, an archived version of the business’s website described her as working “mostly behind the scenes,” “making spreadsheets and burning the cookies for our holiday gift boxes.”
Gluesenkamp Perez’s father did not respond to a request for comment.
Other details are also difficult to square with Gluesenkamp Perez’s account of privation. The congresswoman told Axelrod in 2024 that she relied on “piecework” to pay tuition in cash by the credit hour, extending her time in college to “like seven years.” Yet during that same period, she pursued long-term exotic travel. In 2010, Gluesenkamp Perez embarked upon a months-long bicycle trip from Portland to Quito, Ecuador—an endeavor that typically takes three to six months and would have required stepping away from paid work during a time when students often rely on summer earnings to save money.
An obituary for her former boyfriend, Xeno Taylor-Fontana, who died by suicide on a mountain summit while attending Reed in early 2011, states they began the journey after the spring 2010 semester. Taylor-Fontana took a leave of absence for the trip, suggesting Gluesenkamp Perez may have done the same. According to an unnamed roommate on Eger’s podcast who said he corresponded with her while she was traveling, the two completed the journey and did not return until later that year.
The Ecuador journey was Gluesenkamp Perez’s second extended bicycle trip to Latin America. Her first took place before she enrolled at Reed in 2007. A May 15, 2007, article in the Valley Morning Star, a newspaper in her home state of Texas, reported that at age 18 she embarked on a ride from Austin, Texas, to Veracruz, Mexico, alongside two other cyclists. The article also noted that she planned to study “peace and justice” at Reed—rather than economics, the degree she ultimately earned when she graduated in 2012 (before enrolling at Reed, Gluesenkamp Perez briefly attended Warren Wilson College, an expensive school in the North Carolina mountains).
The unnamed roommate said on Eger’s podcast that he met Gluesenkamp Perez at a chapter meeting of the far-left Students for a Democratic Society and later hired her as a barista at Paradox, Reed’s on-campus coffee shop. He said the job—which, according to Eger, she did not begin until her senior year—would have made little financial impact against the school’s steep tuition costs.
“If you put all, every single one of the baristas for all four years that I worked at the fucking college coffee shop, you combined all the money they made,” the unnamed roommate said, “it wouldn’t pay for one semester of one person’s college.”
Eger says he’s horrified by Gluesenkamp Perez’s “disgusting” politics. After he gave to her 2022 campaign, “Things started getting a little weird, especially with her initial vote against student debt relief, which is so fucking funny now that you look at the fact that she pretends that she paid her way through college.”