About Us

A pair of sunglasses costs about $20 to make.

Acetate frame, metal hinges, gradient lens, hand-finished. Made in the same handful of factories, most of them in Wenzhou, China, a smaller number in Cadore, Italy. They supply the entire industry. The $15 pair on Amazon and the $400 pair at the airport are often shipped from the same loading bay.

That's not a secret. It's just how eyewear works. What's strange is what the industry does with it.

At one end, EssilorLuxottica the company that owns Ray-Ban, Oakley, Persol, Oliver Peoples, and the licensing rights to Prada, Chanel, Versace, Burberry, Tiffany, and most of the luxury names you'd recognise sells you a frame that cost around $25 to make for $400, $700, sometimes over $1,000. The Freakonomics breakdown of their financials puts the markup at roughly 10 to 20 times cost. You're not buying glasses. You're buying the right to wear a logo on the temple.

At the other end, the $12 pair on Amazon is the same factory, the same hinges, but stripped of every margin that paid for quality control, decent acetate, properly graded lenses, or anyone caring whether the screws hold for more than a season. They cost $12 because they should.

What's missing is the middle.

No one is making the $40–60 pair that's just made well . Solid acetate, properly finished hinges, lenses that actually filter UV the way they claim to without wrapping it in a fake heritage story that traces back to a contract factory in Wenzhou anyway.

That's the gap we're trying to fill.

If that's a trade you want to make, fewer logos, better value, the same factory floor as the $400 pair then you're in the right place.