September 2026 Amber Grant Awarded to Ebijou

We’re excited to announce the September $15,000 Amber Grant recipient. Congratulations to Elma Glisson, founder of Ebijou.

Recently, WomensNet Advisory Board member Marcia Layton Turner sat down with Elma for an exclusive interview. You can listen to Elma’s answers and view the transcript below.

Video Transcript

Marcia: Welcome to a chat with our September 2026 Amber Grant winner: Elma Glisson of Ebijou. The Amber Grant is open to all women business owners in the U.S. and Canada at all stages of business development.

I’m Marcia Layton Turner, and I’m one member of our amazing WomensNet advisory board. And every other month, I have the great pleasure of chatting with our winners and always learning something new from them.

Marcia: So, could you tell everyone a little bit about your company, Elma? What do you sell? What do you offer? Where did the idea come from? And how are things going?

Elma: Yes, thank you so much for having me. So, Ebijou is a handmade textile company. We specialize in jewelry, wearable art, things that are colorful and bright and sculptural. I’m an architect and urban designer in my spare time, but my background primarily in architecture has always… I’ve always been fascinated in the built environment and how we experience color and spaces and texture and pattern. And so I’ve also been, sort of, a maker ever since I’ve known myself. So I’ve always been creating jewelry, creating something sculptural because I could never find anything in a store.

And I happened to be taking a flight one day and I’m in line at Starbucks and someone taps me on the shoulder and asks me where she could buy what I was wearing. And when I told her that I made it, she was all excited and thought that she could buy it online. And I had to remind her like, “No, I’m sorry. I don’t have an ecommerce store. I just made this last night.” And so she was really encouraging and saying, “Well, you should definitely have a store. You should do this.” And so I got on an American Airlines flight and wrote out a little business plan on a napkin, and then that turned into Ebijou.

Since then, we’ve done a couple of shows across the country. We are really leaning into this, sort of, like, experience with our customers, which we really like. I am now sort of translating this in-person touching, feeling, experimenting into our first atelier, which I’m in the space right now. That’s sort of the next phase of business, and just really excited to sort of keep the momentum going, and yeah, that’s who we are.

Marcia: Were there any resources that you found especially helpful as you were starting up, a book, a program, a consultant, an agency? Was there anything that you found helpful that you might recommend to people in the WomensNet community that are looking for some help?

Elma: Absolutely. So, I sort of dovetailed into the phase of my business when I became a mom. And trying to juggle new motherhood, a full-time job, and a sort of creative hobby at the time was incredibly difficult. Besides that, I was also struggling with this paralyzing fear, right? This thing has to be perfect before you put it out into the space. And so two things that, kind of, helped me navigate this time. One is a book. It’s called Mother/Founder. It was really helpful reading the stories of other mom entrepreneurs at every stage of business. So, whether these were CEOs of Fortune 500 companies or startups just trying to figure out how to navigate and how to balance. And the story was that there is no balance, right? You just, kind of, have to figure it out as you go along, but you give yourself grace and you create a system and a program and have a village of people that help you.

And then the second piece is a person. So, like I said, I was really, really paranoid about putting things out that weren’t perfect. In the architecture world, you can’t do that, right, because buildings got to stand up. You need your math, you need your structure. You need everything to be in cohesion with each other in order for something to be successful. And so for me, I had this paralyzing fear of it having to be perfect. And I had a conversation with a female founder called Hayet Rida. She is the founder of a jewelry brand called KHOI, and she was gracious enough to have a 30-minute conversation with me. And I remember her words like, “Darling, you have to be comfortable failing. It’s okay. That’s where the magic happens. That’s where you find a breakthrough, and that’s where you’re going to have your best and biggest growth.”

And since that time, I’ve, kind of, leaned into that, of this, kind of, fearlessness approaching business and this world of everything being extra polished and brushed and composed well to be imperfect and to be okay with that and to, kind of, just show up as a woman in this space saying, “This is who I am, and this is what I’ve got, and that’s okay, and that’s enough.” And so those two things have really helped me succeed in business by really leaning into me a little bit more and showing up in the professional space differently.

Marcia: That’s awesome. My mantra for more than 25 years, Elma, has been, “Done is better than perfect.”

Elma: Yes, absolutely. That is it.

Marcia: Excellent. Now let’s talk about marketing. What’s been the best marketing strategy that you’ve used or maybe you plan to use in the future to spread the word about your company?

Elma: We realized early on that we can’t be everywhere all the time. Social media is quite a beast, and the algorithm is always changing, and sometimes it’s really unforgiving, and it can be really discouraging. And so what we’ve found is that meeting our customers where they are, this sort of experiential marketing, is really what we’re leaning into, and that’s why we’re creating our first atelier space where people can come in and really try things on.

They can feel them. They can play with the magnets, snap them off and on, and just have fun in a space and create something that maybe they had not thought of before or a color palette that they’ve never worn, that they’ve never tried. And so really leaning into that experience, that one-on-one, being able to feel, to curate your own thing that no one else will have is really what we’re leaning into now. Echoing everybody else with social media, we’ll attempt our storytelling and really try to show up in this really crazy polished world of things and pictures and perfection and really just try to break through the space with authentic storytelling and just genuine connections with our customers. And yeah, we’re hoping to expand that in this space here, so I’m excited to use the Amber Grant for that.

Marcia: Wonderful. So, last question: What’s one thing that the WomensNet community can do to show support for your business? Maybe that’s subscribing to a newsletter, writing a review, something else, but what’s one thing that you all would like to see?

Elma: Really just follow along on our journey. Follow us along. We’re happy to share. We are excited to discover new things with new people, come into this space. Follow along on our journey through social media. You may sign up for our website or our newsletter via our website, excuse me. And just tell a friend. If there’s someone that you know that’s interested in bold color and living out self-expression and wearing things that speak for them when they enter a room, definitely tell them about us, and we’ll be happy about that.

Marcia: Thank you for being here, sharing your stories, sharing your recommendations, and congratulations again on being our September Amber Grant winner.