Design Evolution

This is another guest post from my father about the origins of the product. It’s not necessarily related to the process of starting this online business, but I think that these stories are interesting. I hope you agree.

Clothing For Your Sunglasses

If you read my previous post about how the idea for this product came about you may recall I used the term “temple arm clothing” to describe my idea. I wanted to create a direct link between the fashion world and eyewear frames. Since clothing is such a fashion industry mainstay it seemed natural to liken this idea to clothing. This idea lead me to make the first prototypes using things like fabric and gem stones. These initial prototypes actually worked pretty well and one of our early customers from Germany still orders these inserts made from fabric. For this initial design the temple inserts weren’t completely flat like most of them are today. Instead they had a slightly raised edge so that the fabric could sit within the edges. The edges helped protect the fabric from wear and tear as the inserts went in and out of the frames. These raised-edge temple inserts are still used today for things like our “mother of pearl” inserts where some exotic material has to be applied to the plastic insert.

Scaling Issues

While these fabric based inserts looked great, we couldn’t always rely on a continuous supply of the needed fabric material without buying it in very large quantities. This lead us to come up with a digital process where we could take any image and transfer it onto the face of a blank plastic insert. The transfer process caused us to start using a completely flat temple insert rather than the raised edge design. Adding a simple clear coat on top gives these digital transfers a shiny gloss finish and protects them from flaking or fading due to exposure to UV light or moisture. This process now lets us quickly and easily create digital designs that can be applied to any of our sunglasses or reading glasses and make the digital prints on-demand. The sky is the limit on the number of designs that we can create and sell. We’ll be leveraging this flexibility over the coming months to push out new designs on a weekly basis and even invite graphic artists and designers to submit their own designs.