How SheerLift Works

5% of every order. Women lifted. Forever.

When you buy a SheerGem piece, 5% of your order is committed to a microloan through Kiva — funding a woman, somewhere in the world, who's building her own business with her own hands.

When she repays her loan — and 96% of Kiva borrowers do — we take that money and lend it again. To another woman. And when she repays, we lend it again. Your single purchase doesn't just help one woman. It keeps lifting, forever.

That's SheerLift.

Why we built it

We could have written a check to a charity and put a logo on the website. We didn't, for one reason: we wanted the impact to be specific, ongoing, and verifiable.

Microloans are different from donations. A donation gets spent once. A microloan gets repaid, then redeployed, then repaid again — turning the same dollar into impact for multiple women across multiple years. That mechanic is why we picked Kiva over a traditional charitable partnership. We wanted SheerLift to compound.

Why Kiva

Kiva has been making this work since 2005. They've facilitated over $1 billion in microloans across 80+ countries. Their borrowers are real women, with real names, real photos, real businesses — not anonymized statistics.

We chose them for four reasons:

The 96% repayment rate is the foundation of our "forever loop" promise. Without it, the relending mechanic doesn't work.

Every Kiva borrower has a public profile — her name, her country, her business, her own words about why she needs the loan. That transparency is non-negotiable for us. We didn't want a program where you'd have to take our word for the impact.

Kiva's operational overhead is low and their reporting is strong, which means more of our 5% reaches the women we're trying to support.

And finally: Kiva is trusted. We didn't want SheerLift's credibility to depend on us being known. By partnering with an organization that's been doing this work for two decades, we let their credibility extend to ours.

How the 5% works mechanically

Every SheerGem order accrues 5% of its purchase price into a SheerLift fund. Each month, we pool that fund and select 3–5 women on Kiva's platform to support — pooling rather than one-loan-per-order because larger contributions per borrower create richer impact than scattering small amounts.

When loans repay (typically 6–18 months later), we relend the funds to another borrower. And again when she repays. And again. The original 5% from your purchase keeps working long after your order shipped.

What you'll see

Every SheerGem order ships with a printed bio card featuring that month's funded borrower — her photo, her name, her country, her business, a quote from her own profile.

When her loan repays and we relend, you'll get an email letting you know: "Maria repaid her loan. Your $25 just funded Priya in Mumbai." That email arrives once, automatically, when the repayment happens.

Every quarter, we publish a public impact report: how many women have been funded, how many loans have been made cumulatively, and updates on past borrowers when Kiva has them.

The first borrower is coming

We're launching SheerGem in May 2026. Our first SheerLift loan will be funded with the proceeds of our launch month, and our first featured borrower — the actual woman your purchase helps fund — will appear on this page and ship with our orders starting in August 2026.

Until then, we feature representative Kiva borrowers on the homepage so you can see the kind of women SheerLift supports. They're real Kiva borrowers; they're not yet borrowers we've personally funded. We mention this because we'd rather be a beat slower and tell you the truth than be impressive and shade it.

Why 5% and not more

We've thought about this. The honest answer is that 5% is what we can sustain forever — through gold price spikes, shipping cost shocks, slow months, fast months, every year going forward. A bigger headline number we couldn't sustain would be worse than a smaller number we can.

We can always go higher publicly: a 10% campaign in October, a Double-Up December, a special launch around an anniversary. We'll do those things. The 5% is the floor, not the ceiling.

What we won't do is reduce it. SheerLift's commitment moves up over time, never down. That's the contract.

Questions

If you have questions about how SheerLift works, where the money goes, or how to verify any of this independently, email us at hello@sheergem.com. We'll answer.

You can also explore Kiva directly at kiva.org — every borrower we feature is publicly searchable on their platform.