Identity
Identity is the moment you stop performing the version of yourself the world is comfortable with and start living the version of yourself that is true. It is terrifying. It is brave. And it is the foundation of everything.
Lumera Jewelry · The Brand Story
The Light
That Stayed On
“The impact is in YOUR story. The jewelry will show your truth.”
As told by Topher, Founder
Our Story
This is a story about a gay man who watched a movie, lost friends he could not save, survived a night that almost took him, and decided with everything he had left to build a light so bright that no one in his community would ever have to find their way in the dark again.
Part One
Steel Magnolias and the Moment Everything Shifted
It started with a movie.
Not a superhero film. Not a blockbuster. A story about women, fierce, funny, heartbroken, unbreakable women, sitting in a beauty shop in Louisiana, holding each other through the kind of grief that does not ask permission before it arrives.
Steel Magnolias.
Topher was a gay man sitting alone watching that film, and something in it cracked him open in the most beautiful way. Because what he saw on that screen was not just a story about women. It was a story about community. About showing up. About the way love between people, real, messy, devoted love, is the only thing that makes the unbearable bearable.
He saw himself in every single one of those women.
He saw his community, the LGBTQIA+ family he had built around himself, the ones who showed up when blood family could not, the ones who called at midnight and stayed until morning, the ones who loved him in the full, complicated, glorious truth of who he was.
And he felt something ignite inside him. A purpose he had not yet found the words for. A mission that was forming in the quiet space between who he had been and who he was becoming.
That movie planted a seed.
And that seed became Maggie’s Gurls Foundation.
Part Two
The Friends He Could Not Save
But purpose, as Topher would come to understand, is rarely born in comfort.
It is born in loss.
In the years that followed, Topher watched friends, beautiful, vibrant, irreplaceable members of his community, end their lives. One by one. People who laughed loudly and loved deeply and carried inside them a light that the world had spent years trying to extinguish.
Each loss carved something deeper into him.
Each loss asked the same impossible question: What if they had known they were not alone?
What if someone had reached them in time? What if there had been something, a resource, a conversation, a community, that said: stay. You are needed. You are loved. You matter?
He could not answer those questions for the friends he had already lost. But he could answer them for the ones still here.
Maggie’s Gurls Foundation was not just named. It was summoned, called into existence by grief, by love, and by the absolute refusal to lose one more person without a fight.
Part Three
2018: The Night Topher Almost Didn’t Make It
And then came 2018.
The year the weight became too much even for the man who had made it his life’s work to carry others.
Topher, who had built a foundation to save lives, who had shown up for his community again and again, who had turned his pain into purpose, found himself in his own darkness.
He made a choice that night that almost ended everything.
But it did not.
Something kept the light on.
He survived.
And in surviving, he understood something he had known intellectually but now knew in his bones: this crisis does not discriminate. It does not spare the helpers. It does not skip the founders.
Which means the work is not optional.
Which means Maggie’s Gurls Foundation is not a nice idea. It is a necessity.
Part Four
Drag Queens With Purpose: Freedom in Full Color
When Maggie’s Gurls Foundation needed a voice, needed a way to reach the community, break through the silence, and make suicide awareness and mental health education something people would actually stop and listen to, Topher did not send a memo.
He did not post a flyer.
He called the Drag Queens.
Drag Queens with Purpose became the beating, glittering, unapologetic heart of Maggie’s Gurls Foundation’s outreach.
Because who better to carry a message about identity, expression, and belonging than people who have made an art form out of becoming exactly who they are, loudly, beautifully, and without apology?
Drag is liberation. It is identity made visible. Expression made undeniable. Belonging made joyful.
This was the work. This was the purpose that Steel Magnolias had planted in him all those years ago.
This was what it looked like when grief became glory.
“Born from survival.
Built for belonging.”
Part Five
Lumera: When Purpose Becomes Something You Can Wear
A year after Maggie’s Gurls Foundation found its voice, Topher asked himself a new question.
What if the mission could be carried not just on a stage, but on a body? What if every single person in the community could wear something that said every day, without words:
I know who I am. I am proud of who I am. And I belong here.
What if the jewelry industry, which had spent decades ignoring the LGBTQIA+ community, could be disrupted by something built entirely from love?
Lumera Jewelry was born.
Named for lumen, light. Because that is what Topher had learned through every loss and every survival: the light does not go out. Not if we protect it. Not if we build things that remind people it is there.
The UNITY Collection, interlocking rings, rainbow infinity pendants, and beaded hoops, was designed to make you feel connected. To yourself. To your community. To every person who has ever loved you and every person you have yet to meet who will.
The Phoenix Rising Collection, double triangles, constellation pendants, love knots, and feathers, was designed to remind you of your own mythology.
You have been in the fire. You have risen. That is not a metaphor. That is your actual life.
And with every purchase, 5% of every dollar goes directly to Maggie’s Gurls Foundation.
The Heart of Lumera
Identity. Expression. Belonging.
Expression
Expression is what happens when identity finds its voice. It is identity made visible. It is how we tell the world, and ourselves, that we are here.
Belonging
Belonging is the destination. It is the feeling that you are part of something. That you are not alone. That you have a family, and they are everywhere, carrying the same light you are.
The Promise
From Topher to You
I almost did not make it to 2019.
I want you to know that. Not because I want your sympathy, but because I want you to understand what it means that you are holding this piece of jewelry right now. That you found us. That you are here.
I built Lumera because I needed it to exist. Because my community needed it to exist. Because every person who has ever felt invisible in a world that was not built for them deserves to wear something that says: you are seen. You are luminous. You belong.
I built Maggie’s Gurls Foundation because I could not save the friends I lost. But I can fight for the ones still here.
And I built Drag Queens with Purpose because I learned that one of the most radical acts of resistance is to be exactly, unapologetically, magnificently who you are.
Every piece of Lumera carries all of that.
Every piece carries the memory of the friends I lost. Every piece carries the night I almost did not survive. Every piece carries the freedom I found on the other side of that darkness.
And every piece carries the hope that you, whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever you are carrying tonight, will find your way to that freedom too.
With everything I have,
Topher
Founder, Lumera Jewelry & Maggie’s Gurls Foundation
The impact is in YOUR story.
The jewelry will show your truth.
It is through identity, expression, and belonging that we truly find ourselves in ways that empower us to become the one person we are made to be in this crazy, beautiful world.