Origins

This is a post that was originally written by my dad about how he came up with the idea for the interchangeable temple inserts.

Downtime

Back in 2006 I was in Wenzhou, China on business. I was already a seasoned China traveller by then, but even the best of us succumb to the intestinal distress that the cuisine and local water supply can induce. The two days I spent in bed staring at the ceiling gave me a lot of time to think. With that much downtime I felt compelled to reinvent the wheel and other equally great feats of mental gymnastics. (Editors note: As a seasoned China traveler myself I can attest to this. I once spent several days in bed having a recurring fever dream about moving large amounts of sand around a desert with my mind. The cause? A bowl of noodles with some water that obviously hadn't been quite boiled all the way through)

Bored

During the latter half of this illness I started thinking about reason I was in China in the first place: scouting out new styles of sunglasses and reading glasses for my customers. I was having a real tough time with eyewear in general because it was so boring to me. The styles never seemed to change; they only got recycled. I also noticed that there seemed to be a total disconnect between eyewear and fashion even though eyewear is considered an important fashion accessory. Most of the stuff I was seeing just didn't seem to have any concrete link to "fashion".

Vacant Real Estate

Wide temples for sunglasses were back in vogue at the time and that wide-templed look had even migrated over to reading / prescription glasses. Then it hit me, all of that "vacant real estate" on the wide temple arms could be used to make the frames more fashionable. My first thought was, "We could make 'clothing' for temple arms to dress them up a bit." The rest of the idea followed almost immediately. I knew that this "temple arm clothing" would have to be easily removable. People changed their clothes every day, so why wouldn't they want to change their temples as well? This initial idea and my early sketches of this concept would later become a patented eyewear design in August of 2008. You can check out the patent for yourself on Google Patents: US Patent #7261409