Category Archives: Eyewear Brands

Atelier Eyewear: the Future of Personalized Glasses

2013 brought Atelier Eyewear, a fashion-forward eyewear line that keeps infinite understanding of its customers. It brings, in a sense, the modern age of bespoke frames that are personalized for you.

Atelier Eyewear was founded by Tim de Rosen and Leslie Kent. They had worked for thirty-five years previous to this joint effort in various educational, internet-related, and marketing endeavors. Together they bring a sheer passion and love of the industry — along with a great drive of knowledge.

They understand the current styles in a different context; for example, they know that nerd glasses frames are “in” right now. But at the same time they have an inherent respect for classic fashion, for art history, and for the ingrained culture in the country around them. They aren’t creating Atelier Eyewear to simply cash-in on a here-today gone-tomorrow industry. They’re meant to stick around.

A Trip around the World

Atelier Eyewear’s initial spark grew in 2010 when Tim de Rosen began researching the market of custom made eyewear. He understood after only a few days that such specs were meant for only a privileged group of people. With prices in the thousand dollar range, he realized that many people had to simply “do without” glasses that fit their face shape or preserved their sense of style.

His research took him out of his comfort zone. He traveled across the world, taking stocks in places like Italy, England, Germany, and Japan. Truly, he turned over every leaf in the eyewear industry and utilized his understanding of world culture and world economics to analyse it. After months of travel and inspection, he stumbled upon a Chinese manufacturer in Shenzhen, southern China. It was fate.

Here in Shenzhen, Tim found a factory owner, a descendant of an original craftsman of personalized glasses who operated in the 19th century. The owner held a strong desire to recreate his ancestor’s eyewear manufacturing. He longed to create personalized, different pieces of eyewear for different people, and he had the understanding of the required skills and the talent to make his dream a reality.

However, he did not have the capital or the experience in the greater eyewear fashion world. Luckily, Tim de Rosen and Leslie Kent invested their experience and, of course, their capital to fuel the Chinese manufacturer’s dream.

Flash forward to present day. Tim de Rosen and Leslie Kent currently introduce an entire range of Sunglasses and Optical pieces. Each item reflects the old Chinese craftsmanship and retains assimilation to the past. They’ve placed state-of-the-art eyewear expertise in order to blast this cultured, beautiful craft into the present tense.

Why Do You Need Atelier?

Atelier Eyewear attempts to rejuvenate your life. If you wear glasses, you probably utilize them for some sixteen, seventeen hours every single day. And, if you don’t have a thousand dollars to casually throw at a fashion statement, you probably haven’t enlisted the assistance of a bespoke company. Therefore, your glasses do not fit you. Period.

This current time of big box companies has generally eliminated the old bespoke, artisan glasses. Because you are a person of the world, you’ve had to assimilate into mass production, therefore the glasses you currently wear are probably worn by some other, trendy individual a few miles away. Chances are, your face shape and your nose shape and your general, overall bone structure are completely different than that person’s. However, the mass production of eyeglasses hasn’t accounted for that.

Atelier Eyewear is bringing unique quality back into the industry. It’s utilizing state-of-the-art online technology in order to understand your precise measurements. You must simply send them your prescription over the Internet, and allow a special software to “fit” you into your designated pair of glasses.

Not only that, you can choose from some forty original styles in both acetate and metal. Currently, Atelier is offering forty colors and finishes to match your personality — or just Thursday’s outfit. When you receive your personalized eye piece, it will actually come with your name on it. At roughly half of the cost of normal tailored, crafted eyeglasses, Atelier Eyewear allows you to prescribe to the very real theory that you are unlike anyone else — and you deserve to feel that way.

Therefore, if you find yourself trying to dress in the current times: like, say, a hipster or a sort of ironic nerd, seek your custom-made glasses with Atelier. Find Buddy Holly styled glasses, shutter-shades, and Ray Ban Wayfarer styles.

As mentioned, Tim studied the thriving culture of eyeglasses and knows the history of each of these eclectic styles. He recommends that if you look for individuality and purpose in your life, you must merge from the box-store ideas of eyeglasses to the stylish, one-off, measured eyewear from Atelier. Only then can you be truly the chic version of yourself.

Oakley Glasses: the Spirit of Top Performance and Innovation

Designer eyewear brand, Oakley, couldn’t have stemmed from more humble — yet adventurous beginnings. Founder James Jannard was something of a renegade: a college drop out with a mind of his own. He spent an entire year roaming the Southwest on his motorcycle. In 1975 after time on the road, James found himself with revving ideas, with constant questions about industry standards with regards to motorcycles and other technologies.

As it happens, his questions were left unanswered in the greater community, so he went into business by himself with just three hundred dollars and his workshop: a garage. He proclaimed he would make products that not only looked better — but products that would work better than anything else on the market. James named his company “Oakley” after his dog.

Sounds Great, But What about Oakley Eyewear?

Jannard’s initial invention involved a particular kind of motorcycle handgrip. The handgrip was meant to formulate to the rider’s hand, rather than the rider’s hand trying to grip something it simply wasn’t meant to grip. This initial idea: to reverse the current item trends and create a user-friendly model, was the entire backbone for the Oakley brand.

Eventually, he created sportswear sunglasses — items that began as necessities and became luxurious and fashionable. Greg Le Mond, a cyclist in the Tour de France, wore a pair of Jannard’s sunglasses the same year he won, thus bringing the Oakley name to the world.

In fact, much of the Oakley name rides on celebrity endorsements. Andre Agassi, a renowned tennis player, sported the glasses for free because he liked Jannard — and he liked the style. Michael Jordan was seen wearing Oakley’s specs quite often as well.

Several decades after this initial marriage of technology and fashion, the brand finds itself at the top tier of eyewear luxury — striving for constant innovation. Oakley, Inc. does not make its eyewear available to the mass-market sales, therefore allowing the brand to remain high-end, on the exterior of the unfortunate drive toward “sameness” or lack of individuality growing in our current markets. With Oakley eyewear, you’re wearing something unique — something made for a particular purpose.

Innovative Technology with No Limits

Today, you can find a whole host of Oakley designer eyepieces, each with a fashionable and technological leap forward in the industry. Because of company’s dynamic history, each pair of glasses formulates a sports eyewear collection — one that allows movement and vibrant life while wearing the glasses. Jannard understood that life was full of adventure at a very early age, and his sense of joie de vivre translates well into his current lines.

The Oakley Crosslink Switch, for example, is a featured piece of Oakley eyewear. It brings a sense of modern, geek chic style, while also providing limitless utility. Like the rest of the line, the Crosslink Switch offers Oakley True Digital Technology and Oakley Stealth coating. But what are they all about?

Because Oakley grounds itself in the sporting world, its utilization of Oakley True Digital Technology is quite important. The lenses are developed with unique Dual Peripheral Technology — a know-how that formulates better motion recognition and peripheral vision. Any glasses wearer understands the importance of this; if you’re on the baseball field and the ball is coming from your right, for example, you wouldn’t be able to see it if your lenses didn’t wrap around a bit utilizing the True Digital, 3D technology. Furthermore, this “wrappage” provides comfort and ease for any shaped head.

Oakley Stealth coating is an advanced lens treatment on all company’s optic products. The coating is meant to be anti-reflective, better for sporting events, and optimal for durability. According to company’s reports, this technology maintains scratch-resistance, allowing your specs to create a seamless, clear vision. It further repels water, prevents streaks, and reduces smudge marks with an oleophobic and hydrophobic surface treatment.

Further Oakley optic technology offers ophthalmic-specific frames, or personalized frames for your face shape. After all, no two people should wear the same pair of glass because no two people have the exact same face shape. Oakley offers metal frames with intrinsic shape memory that allows the shape of your glasses to never falter.

Furthermore, Oakley Activated By Transitions SOLFX lenses are said to be the very first proper interchangeable prescription lens. The glasses can darken in sunlight and lighten in darkness automatically and much more quickly than any other transition lens on the market.

Partnership with Google Glass

The future of Oakley thrives in continued innovation. Its current transition to the first digital music eyewear, Oakley THUMP, brings music directly to your ear from your sunglasses.

Google Glass, a brand new technology that allows you to hold a computer on your eyeglasses for easy access, has recently partnered with Oakley and another high-end eyewear company, Ray Ban. Because Oakley has long held technology and fashion to a high standard, it is the perfect innovator to try to bring Google Glass to the forefront of the greater world. Right now, no one’s paying attention to Google Glass — not really. But no one was paying attention to James Jannard when he started Oakley from his garage, either…

Photo Credit: thecombined.com, Oakley

Ray Ban Eyewear: Timeless Classics with a Twist of Modernity

The initial years of the Ray Ban brand brought ultimate grandeur — grandeur that would formulate a glamorous, luxurious optic company for the following nearly eighty years. The initial year was 1936 when an American test pilot John A. Macready felt he had permanent eye damage from the bright sun during one of his balloon flights. He asked Bausch & Lomb to create a sort of sunglass protection that held all of the sophistication of a handsome uniformed man — like himself.

The following year, Bausch & Lomb followed up on Macready’s request. They created the very first Ray Ban model: an “Aviator.” Gold-plated metal frames wrapped around a deep green, anti-glare glass lens. The lens was specifically designed to filter out ultraviolet and infrared sunrays, thus protecting the eyes.

In these initial years before Michael Jordan wore Oakley’s or Victoria Beckham sported dark framed nerd glasses, a man named General Douglas MacArthur donned the Ray Ban model and became a sort of war hero endorsement. He stood on the shores of the Philippines mid-World War II and rendered himself as an icon of sophistication. And thus: the Ray Ban brand was born.

The Ray Ban Wayfarer brought a different frame material, turning away from the metal frames in the 50s to a more of-the-age thick plastic. These styles are quite popular now in optic glasses, and the Wayfarer’s deep, engrained culture during this time is much of the reason for that.

Think of Audrey Hepburn in her iconic film Breakfast at Tiffany’s: she dons Wayfarer’s and currently blinks out from beneath them in every college dorm room in the world. An iconic symbol! And this dramatic grandeur continued throughout the century. Find Ray Bans on James Dean, John Kennedy, Bob Dylan, Bono, John Lennon, Buddy Holly and Marilyn Monroe — some of the biggest names in the history of the world. As they stand in their très chic Ray Bans, they emit every formation of cool.

In 1999, an Italian company Luxottica Group bought the Bausch & Lomb frame business, bringing Ray Ban into its mix. Afterwards, major expansions began to assimilate into the company. In 2003, Ray Ban Optical was formed, providing a specific inspiration for prescription lenses. Its mission was to bring the culture and sophistication of the sunglasses into the optical sphere.

Ray Ban Glasses: A Room for Personalization

Ray Ban’s current status as center of attention in the optic universe is apparent. Look to their marvelous selection: the classic, inspired shapes in their optic collection Legends, and their clean, sharp lines in their Tech collection. Ray Ban Kids boasts funky, energetic colors and shapes that bring a bit of pep to the young children’s style. Various Ray Ban frames are offered with bizarre and wonderful textures; they include touches of fine art tweaks and bits of leather.

The Ray Ban optics collection allows you to personalize your eyewear. It allows you to choose from four broad styles: Active Lifestyle, Highstreet, Icons, and Tech. Each broad style seems representative of a different part of Ray Ban’s elaborate history. The icons style, for example, brings you back to Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Some of the Icon style rims are romantic, Hollywood-esque. Several promote browlines fashion, reminiscent of the 50s, a lost era. The Aviator optic glasses are absolutely represented here, bringing the entire realm of Ray Ban’s historical years at the forefront of glasses fashion. A perusal through the Tech style section renders Carbon Fibre glasses: glasses that bring high technology in order to formulate better utilization. Ray Ban understands that while the icon styles are beautiful, they no longer hold as much utility. Therefore, they’ve assimilated themselves into the changing times and created the Tech styles.

The Active Lifestyle styles are sleek, sharp, and modern, while the Highstreet styles are fashion-forward, bringing modernized, present-day touches to current hipster trends. Each style allows you to choose from ten different colors and two different frame materials: metal or plastic.

Furthermore, Ray Ban’s extensive technology has brought five different frame innovations, each formed from a different material. Carbon fibre, light-ray, light-force, titanium, and memo ray are available. Memo fiber is both strong and flexible, while carbon fibre provides utmost comfort. The light-ray holds no screws and is hypoallergenic, while the light-force is both light and durable. The final frame, titanium, promotes itself as the lightest, strongest frame.

New Day Technology and Partnerships

These days, Ray Ban has partnered with a brand new eyewear industry: Google Glass, which provides a computerized mechanism on your glasses; it allows you to utilize it like a smart phone — without your hands. The only trouble is, Google Glass brings no beauty, no fashion-forward thinking, and certainly no iconic brand. They’re a technology brand, first and foremost. However, this partnership could have the world singing a different tune.

After all, celebrities throughout the decades have donned Ray Ban. They felt the necessity to feel completely cool while protecting their eyesight. Therefore, people could find reasons to have computers in their immediate eyesight if Ray Ban provides them with a cool, chic reason to do so. With Ray Ban as the Google Glass partner, we may find a different, more technologically-focused fashion future.

Photo Credit: mressentialist.com

TD Tom Davies: The First Truly Bespoke Eyewear on the Market

Photo Courtesy of Tom Davies

Who is this man, Tom Davies — entrepreneur and owner of TD Tom Davies eyewear? With such a common name, shouldn’t he have a common job, a common life? Tom Davies, the milkman. Or Tom Davies, the local schoolteacher. An every day hero — not a master of the eyewear world, not a man at the top of the fashion sphere.

At this time, Tom Davies exists as the largest maker of bespoke glasses in the entire world. Perhaps he can be defined as an everyday man’s hero: a man looking to find you the best shape and frame for your face, the eyeglasses through which you will see each day of your life.

The Idea Behind Tom Davies Bespoke Service

When Davies went to China in his early twenties, he faced a realization many travelers embrace: that not all countries are the same — that face shapes shift over continents, that measurements of foreheads, noses, chins change like trees and bushes in different climates. Therefore, he chose to incorporate this idea in his design — either offering it as a bespoke service or a couture service.

Photo Courtesy of Tom Davies

Tom’s bespoke and couture industry should be defined: bespoke is casual re-calibration of your face. Therefore, it takes an original, stock design eye frame and places it appropriately with the measurements of your face. Not all faces are the same, of course, and this allows you to receive the “proper size” of the fashion item for which you’ve sent. Like tailoring a dress, for example — a wedding dress style requiring the proper calibrations for your body shape.

When his clients aim toward a couture line, however, things go into infinite meanderings. He takes three photos of the clients face and sends the photos back to experts in China — the country he spent nine years learning to work in the eyeglass industry, thus honing his current design knowledge. While the client picks the general design, color, even specific type of horn for material usage — the Chinese craftsmen yield the final result. The clients are pleased with their handcrafted frames. Davies is the proud in-between.

This is More Just Individuality!

Davies starts at the optician: the man prescribing the very frames you need. (This is assuming you aren’t pegging for frames for vanity’s sake.) He has linked many opticians with his Chinese hand-craft workshop. The opticians utilize the Supertool web design community to input the eyeglass seeker’s choice of color, textures, medias, and various measurements. Within just a couple of hours, the skilled agents in Shenzhen have created efficient arms for the frames. Davies simply creates a simplistic piece for the front of the frames: something the wearer specified, something subtle and perfect, fitted to his three photos assessing face shape.

Photo Courtesy of Tom Davies

Tom Davies’ frames to this date have been most useful for just his initial purpose: for those in need of strange sizes — those from different ancestral backgrounds but similar integral fashion senses. The large-headed male and the teeny female cranium can now join together with the same frame shape.

How could the frame industry have overlooked such difference in size before? The lenses must change, of course, from person to person — this has been the current definition of the eyeglass world. But across a broad spectrum of people, you wouldn’t even assume a one hat fits all scenario would do. Why did we go so long associating this one for all idea with eyeglass frames? Hindsight is 20/20.

Glamorous or Intelligent? You can have both!

And now, several years after that fateful decade spent in China, the not so common Tom Davies is set to open his own eye clinic — with ready-to-wear glasses, bespoke and couture services all laid out in Sloane Square, London.

Photo Courtesy of Peter Akkerman

Tom verifies that the “not one size fits all” technique will only last him so long. He must promote to a larger audience, the in-betweeners without a direct need for specialized frames. He must assert that individuality exists in a different hue, in a more obtuse slant of a hipster eye frame.

Don’t continue down this path of assertion that whatever exists at your downtown obstetrician is the only option. Your glasses should be like your next tattoo, your next big fashion step. They should proclaim something about you and your individuality: be it your spectacular nose or your affinity for the color purple. Let TD Tom Davies take you there.

Discover the Hidden Treasures of Horn Frames with Rigards Eyewear

Photo Courtesy of Rigards Eyewear

Rigards eyewear. The name is based on a verb, a command — the French command to glance, to look. To Regard. And the rigorous craftsmanship of Rigards frames will stop you in your tracks, force you to scrutinize your eyewear and understand: is it utilizing its materials properly? Is it handmade, a direct result of a treasured realization between two future eyewear partners — a realization that there was a new way to create an eyewear line? Or is it lacquered — synthetic; a cheap knock-up of those hipster frames all the chic girl-next-door librarians are wearing. Put a pop in your style. Regard this.

Rigards eyewear brand is centered exclusively on the material of horn: the original makeup of horn rim glasses. And who can resist the material? But it’s different this time: more on the environmental side, which is, of course, the side to which nerd glasses wearers flock. The horn make-up of the Rigards glasses come from water buffalo growing up on small farms. Each piece has a different texture, a different personality — much like the water buffalo — and thus corresponds with a different style, enhancing the coloring and the wearer’s face shape.

The Collaboration Between Two Friends

The frames are handcrafted with ancestral, handed-down techniques in Hong Kong. They are specially finished with a treatment, and honed in for a smattering of sizes — fitting both western sized heads and more petite Asian faces. The Rigards line is the product of collaborators Ti Kwa and Jean-Marc Virard, both long-time glasses collectors and studiers of antique frames — thus, of course, they include these time-honored handcrafting resources. They know their stuff. Their brand equates them: Kwa is head of design and production. Virard finds himself director of marketing and branding.

Photo Courtesy of Rigards Eyewear

Upon understanding the utilization of these old time materials and processings, you could dismiss Rigards are being just another vintage line. Wrong. They are avant-garde, almost strange — new-age. Their colors boast the real-world colors of the water buffalo horns out of Ethiopia and Egypt. They are thick — zoning in on this nerd-chic current craze but also mastering it with the vintage ideas of the original glasses. The frames hold structure — have a sense of architecture on your face. They yield a sense that what you view through those frames fill you with passion — they are the frames that elevate you into your dreaming reality.

Why horn rims, though? It’s an important choice. The horn material was originally chosen by the Inuits long ago: they sheathed the horn from mammoths and used the material to form sun-protectant lenses. Horn is natural, of course, therefore forming to your face overtime — adjusting to its temperature and shape. The water buffalo: the important factor in this Rigards utilization, are used sort of like cows in Ethiopian and Egyptian cultures. Thus, they work the fields; the owners and members of society eat the meat. They have a cycle of life and death that is fully formed. Rigards receives the horn material after the death of the animals. They are specifically not killed for the frame purpose. Rigards further package their frames in the leather material of a buffalo, fueling the concept that one must not waste in this environmentally conscious society.

Rigards Eywear is Made to Withstand the Time

Photo Courtesy of Rigards Eyewear

The future of the Rigards line is unapologetic, taking leaps and bets in this recession that proclaim sheer lack of fear. One of their new lines, brought in for Paris fashion week, features a hazardous scratching technique on a black matte: thus creating texture on texture, grey on black. They’ve chosen to name the technique after classic Akira Kurosawa samurai film “Sanjuro”, thus initiating the frames in this old samurai order. Sanjuro is the sword-wielding samurais use to take out their victims. Viyard says, in an interview with Cool Huntings, that “Kurosawa created a whole series and another world; we are kind of creating a new world through this texture that is as natural as possible.”

Rigards frames are unusual, but hold this pulse of the natural, physical world that most other frames abandon for easier materials. Don’t overlook them as too avant-garde: the material and the brand speak wonders for the final products. You can ask the designers themselves: each product is handcrafted, made to order—from the natural world to their new home as a fashion statement on your face.