Frequently Asked Questions

Daily Grommet is an online marketplace and the birthplace of Citizen Commerce. It's about time we all "take back the shelves," at retail and replace outdated ways of doing business. By telling the true stories behind products and companies, we are helping people to support products with deeper meaning and true benefits.

It’s a product that amplifies something good in the world, whether it's technical innovation, green or social enterprise, inventive design, a disruptive new business, the creation of jobs, the preservation of communities, domestic manufacturing, the support of craft, or a simply a good solution to a problem. It comes from a designer, inventor, artist, or manufacturer who is clearly passionate about what they create. Someone who loves to share their creations and talk to people about why they do what they do. It comes from a company that treats its customers well. Finally, like any intelligent or beautiful product, it has a great story, ready to be told. Got a great Grommet idea? Tell us about it. See the ideas people have recently submitted to us in our Citizens' Gallery.

Daily Grommet is a business. We make money by partnering with other businesses, the ones who create the products we feature every day. Those businesses don’t pay a fee to appear on the site, and we do not accept any advertising. We put our resources into spreading the word about products we believe in, and when someone purchases a product from the Daily Grommet site, we receive a portion of that sale. So in that way, if they do well, we all do well. Our partners appreciate the effort we make in our daily email, blog, Facebook page and other outlets to let people know about their products.

As part of our partnership arrangement, we try to give enough information about each product to encourage people to buy from the Grommet site rather than elsewhere on the web. We also try to save you time because we carefully select the very best product selections from any given partner. If you have additional questions about any Daily Grommet product, you can post them on the product’s “Talk about this Grommet” section, or send an email to us at CustomerSupport@dailygrommet.com.

Before we launch each story, we scour the web to be sure we are offering the best price out there. We sometimes miss some short-term promotions from deep discounters. But generally you can’t do better than at Daily Grommet.

We discover and sell just one Grommet a day on our homepage. That’s the point. We know you’re busy, and we don’t want to take up too much of your time. But after 24 hours (longer on the weekend), we move the product to our catalog. You can still learn about and buy each and every Grommet there.

Well, we don’t really announce that. It would take the fun out of it. Check back with us every day at noon ET, or sign up for our email alerts, or follow us on Facebook or Twitter and we’ll keep you up to date.

Sure. Just search our catalog, and you’ll see all the products we’ve featured before. Once you view a Grommet you want, click on the orange "Buy Now" button and you’ll be on the road to making that purchase. And, if you want to just catch up on the last 30 days of Grommets, take a look at the bottom of our page, where we highlight the most recent Grommets.

Sure. Just click here to sign up or look at the top of any page on our site, and you’ll see a place to enter your email address. We’ll hook you right up with a daily email to give you a first crack at the Grommet of the day.

Yes. Here it is. Please become part of our community -- you’ll get all kinds of great, behind-the-scenes info; you can enter our Grommet giveaways; and you can tell us more about yourself and what you’d like to see here on Daily Grommet.

Absolutely. Follow us @dailygrommet -- and keep an eye out for the #GrommetIdea hashtag to see what others are discovering or searching for.

At the heart of it, we’re a group of people who want to change the world by highlighting people and companies that are doing just that, via their innovations. We take a holistic approach to evaluating products and companies: we look for an excellent concept supported by equally exceptional design and engineering, we can tell the difference between true and false claims, and we celebrate real passion and sincerity.

We're independent—no one pays us to select a product. In fact, the best thing is, lots of people help us by sharing their own favorite discoveries. We get dozens of Grommet idea submissions each week. We're enabling a vibrant Citizen Commerce movement.

If you have an idea, please let us know here. And take a look at our Citizens' Gallery of idea submissions. You'll see your idea show up here. Encourage your friends to comment on your idea and even "like" it. This additional intel really helps us understand what ideas resonate with people. We also really like to hear from other people who have used the product and can share their experience.

It's not about being smart, it’s about being shamelessly curious and adventurous. We are curious about why a product exists, who created it, and who loves it. We know that getting those stories communicated to the outside world is one of the hardest things for product creators to do. Bricks and mortar shops just can’t do that. E-commerce sites want to move massive volume of products, not tell the stories behind them.

We don’t have to worry about running a store, or pushing lots and lots of products at once. We can take the time to care about each Grommet…their stories are our favorite part. Beyond that, we’ve spent our whole lives creating products ourselves, so we’re pretty passionate about that process, and love to support the many, many people out there doing beautiful, creative and innovative things.

Just fill out this form. We look at every idea people give us, and we'll get back to you if we choose to dive deeper on an idea. We try to be prompt and respond efficiently, but sometimes these ideas become a tidal wave and it might take us longer than we would like. You can also browse through our Citizens' Gallery of idea submissions.

We’re looking for products and services that have one of more of the following qualities:

• Practical problem solvers
• Technological innovations
• Beautifully crafted
• Inspired design solutions
• Whimsical or funny
• Have a social enterprise benefit
• Are ecologically responsible

Have a great Grommet idea? Tell us about it here.

Every person has the power to make a difference with each purchase they make, supporting companies that do “good” such as giving back to their community or being ecologically responsible. Click here to read more about how you can be part of this movement.

What we share together at Daily Grommet is an interest in inventive and innovative products, a chance to chat about the Grommets, and to offer suggestions to the creators of the day’s Grommet through our daily discussion board to the left of each Grommet video. Having a chance to hear from and interact directly with people about their products is one of the main reasons Grommet creators like to have products on our site. Another thing our community loves to do is give us new ideas for Grommets. We depend on folks just like you for that.

We want to be able to converse with you about more than just the day’s Grommet, so we talk about all kinds of on our blog, and we’d love to hear from you there, too. Some of our favorite topics include design, finding, testing, reviewing, rejecting and loving products, seasonal stories and topics, discoveries of all type, and our personal stories at Daily Grommet. We know you’ve got lots on your mind, too, other than the particular product we’re featuring each day. Chime in, leave some comments, or just read what others are saying. Our founder, Jules Pieri, has a blog, too. You can see it here.

General rule of thumb - do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Daily Grommet is not responsible for user-submitted content although we monitor these areas and we reserve the right to delete, revise or refuse any comments or contributions that we consider to be offensive, spam, or not relevant to the discussion. In making posts, we ask that our visitors:

• not post personal information (addresses, phone numbers, etc.)
• not post advertising (or thinly-veiled advertising)
• not post fabricated reviews (good or bad) of products you have not experienced yourself
• not post anything that is not suitable for a general population, including kids. No need to use foul language, or innuendo, there are plenty of other places for that.

We welcome posts sharing various viewpoints and ask that the conversation remains respectful of everyone's unique point of view. If a post is overly disrespectful you risk having your post pulled and your point of view not represented.

Daily Grommet reserves the right to delete, revise or refuse any comments or contributions that we consider to be offensive, spam, or not relevant to the discussion. Daily Grommet is not responsible for user-submitted content although we intend to monitor this and remove contributions as noted above.

(Finally, as we write this answer we have to say what a genuine pleasure it is that we RARELY have to even worry about the above problems. We just don’t attract that kind of bad apple.)

In a funky, sun-filled Victorian house that was converted to offices, on a little lane in Lexington, Massachusetts. Our address is 6 Wallis Court, Lexington, MA 02421.

Daily Grommet is an online marketplace and the birthplace of Citizen Commerce, a movement that gives people the information and tools to support products that align with their own values. It's a powerful new way to discover, share, and sell consumer products.

Our founders, Jules Pieri and Joanne Domeniconi, used to work together at Keds, many moons ago. Because they both recognized that there is an unprecedented supply of inventive products being created every day, all hitting the same brick wall when it comes to breaking through at retail, they decided to form a company that would fix that problem. Given that consumer products form 65% of the economy, this looked like a really worthy problem to solve.

Every day at noon we launch one inventive consumer product or service and broadcast its story across the web. People all over the world give us suggestions for products. They tell us why they should be Grommets. We test and curate the best ideas, and then create a video review and word of mouth campaign for each product. When a product launches on Daily Grommet, we host a discussion board on our site where people can chat directly with the creator of the product and with us.

If you’d like to see some of the ideas currently being submitted to Daily Grommet, take a look at our Citizens' Gallery. Better yet, submit an ideafor a possible Grommet yourself!

Follow the Grommet story as it evolves, on our founder Jules' Blog and on the Daily Grommet Blog.

Well, we could tell you a bunch of esoteric design stuff, but the bottom line is that our founder Jules Pieri is simply crazy about grommets. Yes, that piece of hardware. They signify attention to detail to her, but she especially loves them when they are used in unexpected places, like on stationery, or clothing. She even has a way-cool skirt with big grommets plastered all over the front.

Okay, there is a little more to it than that. We liked the idea of having a name that isn’t obvious (did we nail that one, or what?) It’s okay with us that not everyone knows what a grommet is (by the way, it’s the eyelet on a shoe, or the metal ring at the top of a nice shower curtain.) We like that it might take a little discovery, or that people might come up with their own meaning. Mostly, we were looking for a noun that would not place any limitations on the types of great products we can share with you. To us, "Grommet" captures what it means to take a little-known product and help people discover it by telling its true story. In other words, to make it a "Grommet."

In order to speed up your web experience, browsers are designed to download web pages and store them on your computer's hard drive in an area called a cache. The cache contains a record of the items you have seen, heard, or downloaded from the web, including images, sounds, web pages, and so on.

When you visit the same page again, the browser loads it from your cache instead of downloading everything again—so you see the page faster. That’s the good news. The bad news? If a page has been updated, you will see the older version, or the page display can look odd. When the cache fills up, performance can slow down and your hard drive may run out of space.

Periodically clearing your cache can significantly improve the speed and performance of your browser. Here are two sites that provide directions on how to clear your cache, depending on which browser you’re using:

• http://www.wikihow.com/Clear-Your-Browser%27s-Cache
• http://www.bnl.gov/itd/webapps/browsercache.asp