Our Story
Gaia was born from a life lived close to the earth — and a belief that the companies doing the most honest work in the world deserve to be found.
Jake
Founder & Steward
Based inEly, Minnesota
Ely sits on the edge of the Boundary Waters — one of the last places in America where the wilderness is genuinely in charge. People here maintain a deep reciprocity with the land, with each other, with the ecosystem they depend on. They don't talk about community as a value. They live it. That mutual rootedness — to earth, to neighbours, to something larger than commerce — is exactly what Gaias Global is built around. Ely didn't inspire the mission. It is the mission, made visible.
Boundary Waters Country · Minnesota
Jake grew up on the banks of the Mississippi River in central Minnesota, in a time and place where the natural world wasn't something you visited — it was the context for everything. The 1980s and 90s in rural Minnesota weren't a curated outdoor experience. They were work, weather, community, and the particular kind of knowledge that comes from being somewhere long enough to understand it.
A corporate career followed — and with it, a slow accumulation of evidence that the structures most people build their lives around are extractive by design. Not in a dramatic way. Just quietly, persistently taking more than they return. The land teaches reciprocity. Most institutions teach the opposite.
Gaia is a response to that gap. There are thousands of small, rooted producers doing serious work — growing, pressing, tending, making — with integrity and care for the places and communities they belong to. They are simply hard to find, because the platforms built to surface them were designed for scale, not for soil. Gaia is built for the latter.
This is not a technology company that happens to care about the earth. It is an earth-first company that uses technology to close the distance between you and the people who made what you're holding.