The Founder
Elizabeth Groch
“The most beautiful things in the world are being made by the women the world has forgotten.”
Elizabeth “Liz” Groch, 36, grew up in Clarence, New York — a quiet suburb of Buffalo in western New York State — in a household where her father was a patent attorney and her mother a former textile buyer who had traveled the world sourcing fabrics for department store chains. That early exposure to the idea that beautiful things came from overlooked places planted a seed that would take two decades to bloom.
At 14, she left home for Wallingford, Connecticut, to attend The Choate Rosemary Hall School, where she found herself surrounded by the children of diplomats, artists, and industrialists. She was the scholarship girl from Buffalo who somehow became the most elegantly dressed person in the dining hall — not through wealth, but through a preternatural eye for combining the unexpected.
“I was more interested in the women weaving baskets outside the conference rooms than the men sitting inside them.”
She captained the debate team, edited the literary magazine, and spent her summers traveling with her mother to textile markets in Istanbul and Oaxaca. She went on to Harvard College, graduating with honors in Art History, writing her senior thesis on the role of adornment in female economic agency across Sub-Saharan Africa — a thesis that would turn out to be the blueprint for her life's work.
At Harvard she was relentlessly intellectually curious, spending semesters abroad in Florence and Nairobi, writing for the Crimson, and developing the quietly commanding presence that would later make her a force in boardrooms and village markets alike.
After Harvard, she joined Goldman Sachs in New York as an analyst — an expected path that lasted exactly two years before she realized that the world she wanted to build did not live on a spreadsheet. She enrolled at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, earning her MBA with a focus on social enterprise and impact investing. Wharton gave her the financial architecture to build what her art history degree had taught her to dream.
She spent the next seven years in finance and private equity, traveling constantly — Southeast Asia, East Africa, the Andes — on deals that often left her more interested in the women weaving baskets outside the conference rooms than the men sitting inside them.
In 2021, on a sourcing trip to Marrakech, she met a Berber woman named Fatima who made the most extraordinary silver cuff bracelet Liz had ever seen, using techniques passed down through four generations. Liz bought every piece Fatima had, photographed them, and posted them on a makeshift Instagram page she called “Dens of Thieves” — a reference to the vibrant, chaotic souks and bazaars she loved, and a wink at the idea that beauty had been quietly “stolen” from the world's most overlooked corners.
The account gained 40,000 followers in 72 hours. By the end of the month, she had quit her job.
Today, Dens of Thieves: The Liz Groch World Collection sources exclusively from women artisans in economically challenged communities across 10+ countries. Every piece is one-of-a-kind or extremely limited. Liz personally vets every creator and travels to meet them on their own terms — in their homes, their workshops, their markets.
Ten percent of every sale goes directly back to the artisan's community, and Liz is building a microfinance program to help women artisans formalize their businesses, register trademarks for their traditional designs, and access global markets independently of the collection.
She currently splits her time between New York City and the road.
On the Road
Dispatches from the field
Marrakech, Morocco
Rajasthan, India
Cusco Region, Peru
Accra Region, Ghana
Hội An, Vietnam
New York City