Eyewear falls into two broad categories: practical and fun. It’s easy to understand how someone with an industrial design background might end up working for a large manufacturer updating styles for a mainstream collection. But where do the people come from who design the wackier stuff? The simple answer is “all over the place.” Herewith you will find the stories of three of the industry’s more innovative, independent design companies. One designer comes from an optical family. Another marketed skateboards and managed nightclubs. And one infamous duo were self-described “beach girls.”

Gai Gherardi and Barbara McReynolds

The story of two of California’s best-known and most interesting eyewear designers begins four decades ago on a beach. “It was the 60s,” says Gai Gherardi, one-half of the design duo better known as L.A. Eyeworks. “I was involved in being completely immersed in the 60s.” “We lived at Huntington Beach,” chimes in Barbara McReynolds, the other half of said duo. “We were beach girls.” The iconoclastic pair met in high school and enjoyed the fruits of that most celebrated decade of cultural revolution. They hung out at the beach, worked in the music business, or surfed, or just generally were hippies fighting the good fight in the anti-war movement. And their fascination with eyewear began in childhood. “I got my first pair of glasses [in grade eight], and it did everything I wanted,” says McReynolds. “I put them on and I got attention and felt different.” During college, she got a part-time job at an optical shop thanks to this lifelong fascination with glasses. She loved the fashion of frames, but also the equipment, and started to further her knowledge of the industry at night school. When more help was needed at the store, she got Gherardi on board. Going into retail didn’t cause them to turn their backs on their hippie roots. One day they met an anti-war activist who was helping students avoid the draft. He explained that the army checked prescriptions using a lensmeter, and anything over 8.00 was considered blind. So they began making special glasses with a –8.00 right lens and a plano left lens of a similar thickness. “It didn’t take us very long to be frustrated with the offerings and exploring what we could do to them,” McReynolds says of their early days in optical. They took frames and experimented with engraving, jewelling, and heating and re-shaping them. Before long, they decided to go into business for themselves. It was an obvious choice, since they had no background in design, and no entrepreneurial experience. In 1979, a neighbour designed a shop for them on Melrose Avenue, which was “a wasteland at the time.” The shop’s design was forward, modern, and with a lasting appeal. It was “an overnight success,” McReynolds says. There were no “designer” frames with big logos and some apparel designer’s name stamped on them. And at a time when 62 mm eye sizes were in vogue, the shop stood out with its offering of smaller frames sporting eye sizes in the neighbourhood of 46. This was Los Angeles, and the young duo’s shop managed to get into commercial shoots, a Jackson Five video and movies, such as Blade Runner. In 1980, they made their first trip to Europe to meet with manufacturers in France, with an eye to designing a new line of eyewear unlike anything else available on the market. They also discovered how bad American coffee was and fell in love with the Parisian café culture. So, when they got home to L.A., they knew what to do with a vacant building next door to their shop. As with their entry to the eyewear business, they really had no idea what they were doing. All the same, they bought a really snazzy espresso machine and, despite having no kitchen, opened a restaurant. (They brought in desserts and other food.) They later teamed up with a local sous chef who came in and started developing dishes for the restaurant. With rave reviews, they were regularly packing the tiny venue’s 36 seats and, two years later, opened a second restaurant. Eventually, they had 500 employees, plus cooking shows and cookbooks. They sold their restaurants in 1990 to focus on their optical business, which was going international. Today, their frames continue to turn heads, and Gherardi and McReynolds are getting ready to fight the establishment once again by expanding their small retail chain into new markets. They expect to have new locations and financing in place by the end of 2008.

Henrik Orgreen

Almost 20 years after Gherardi and McReynolds stepped off the beach and opened their shop, another new face came to the world of eyewear design. Henrik Orgreen lived halfway around the world, in Denmark, and was doing PR, marketing and sales for snowboards, skateboards and streetwear, and was running nightclubs. Orgreen and his friend and business partner Tobias Vandrup were living the dream, earning their money while living on their skateboards and snowboards. But the company they worked for got sold to a large multinational and, a decade after getting into the industry, they found that the culture had changed. “It wasn’t the same anymore and the ideals were different,” says Orgreen. It was still a very cool industry, but he found himself working with kids who didn’t understand business, and anything that might be “cool” was bought out almost indiscriminately. One day, an optician who was a former client suggested to Orgreen that he design a line of glasses. Orgreen immediately dismissed the idea. “I wasn’t interested,” he says. But that suggestion was seminal to his optical design success. While he dismissed the idea at first, the suggestion started to sink in after being repeated a few times. Eventually, he realized that he should make sunglasses. He went to Vandrup and they talked over this new business venture. Apparently, Vandrup said: “Okay.” They spent the next year figuring out how to design sunglasses and get them manufactured, which unsurprisingly was a significantly different challenge from designing graphics for clothing. Orgreen had no formal design training. He’d enjoyed drawing as a kid, he says, and was responsible for some graphics work when he was managing the nightclubs, but that’s all. Vandrup had a better base of knowledge, having studied at the Danish Design Academy. Their lack of experience in optical design was a big challenge. But it was also liberating, says Orgreen. “We weren’t affected by the optical industry. We wanted to bring something new to it. There were so many ideas not being used and so many possibilities.” In 1998, their first sunglasses came out. They had clean lines and little ornamentation—the hallmarks of Scandinavian design. The sunglasses were an overnight success, but optical is a tough industry. Orgreen had sold his house and maxed out his loans to get the business going. With its long winters, however, Scandinavia is not the best place for a fledgling designer sunglass company. In the end, it was a move into optical frames that saved Orgreen from bankruptcy. Many of his customers were already popping prescription lenses into his frames, so it wasn’t an unnatural shift for the business, even if it was one he’d resisted. “If I hadn’t done that, there’d be no Orgreen Optical today,” he says. Celebrating its 10th anniversary this year gives Orgreen the opportunity to reflect back on his career. When he started out, there were so many ideas they felt they needed to get out that the company’s identity suffered from a multiple personality disorder. “Back then we had so many ideas,” he says. “Customers got extremely confused about who we were. It was good collections, but each on a different frame.” The flood of ideas hasn’t stopped, but now they’ve calmed down and manage to focus on one idea per season. This year will see a return to their roots in acetate, the material used on their first frames. The company has since focused on titanium. The new frames will combine an acetate front with a little piece of two-tone titanium at the hinge, then a long acetate temple. Orgreen frames have also tended to be wide, masculine and rectangular. Now they’re becoming more inclusive, still with generally masculine shapes, but trending toward rounds and ovals, and frames for smaller faces.

Jason Kirk

Inspired design does not only come from hippies and skaters, though. Believe it or not, it can also come from more established optical bloodlines. And Jason Kirk is living proof of that. Kirk grew up in London, England. His grandfather, Sidney, was an optician and inventor. Actually, up until Jason Kirk’s generation, everyone in the family was involved in optical, and the people behind Kirk Optical in North America are relatives of his. But Kirk and his generation shied away from optical. He studied French and worked in sales and marketing for L’Oreal. Then, one day in 1992, he was helping his father clean out his shop and made a life-altering discovery. “I found boxes of beautiful old frames my grandfather had designed [in the 50s and 60s],” he says. He put sunglass lenses in them and took them out to stores. In the conservative world of British eyewear, they didn’t go over well. But in fashion circles, they were a hit, and were soon selling alongside upscale designer goods in stores such as Harrods. Soon Kirk was making his own frames, sourcing old stocks of acetate from factories that were shutting down across de-industrializing England, giving him instant limited editions. But demand began to outstrip supply, so he started looking at new materials to maintain that uniqueness. Thus he started working with acrylic, which gives him a different palette of colours to work with, and which holds its shape well. But it was a challenge getting a manufacturer to work with it. “We go to a factory and they say it can’t be done, then we know we’re onto something,” he says. It took three years to work out the process for making acrylic frames, he says, and there were three years invested in a way to hand paint them—a process developed by someone with a background in painting cars. From 1992 to 94, Kirk says he scarcely ate. In 1994, they first attended Silmo and started picking up partners such as Lunettes du Jura in Tokyo. The business started to build over the next two years, and in 1996 received a huge push from Jeff Banks on BBC’s The Clothes Show. After that, they opened a store in Covent Garden and on opening day had a line-up of people saying they’d been trying to track down the frames. That same year, he opened a factory in Colchester to produce his frames. But after five years, the factory had become obsolete, and couldn’t work in concert with aluminium factories in France and Italy. Over dinner, Kirk and his wife Karen (a graphic designer) were chatting with friends who had moved to Argentina for work. They were envious of that freedom. Then they realized that they were the bosses in their company, and could do whatever they bloody well pleased. So they packed up their young family and moved to France in 2002, “because of the savoir faire” culture of artisanship that was in stark contrast to English industrialism. It was a move that proved liberating to Kirk, and which allowed him to focus on design. Today, his company is enjoying the success of its personality marketing Kirk Heroes collection, its more recent, fluorescent “Wild” collection, and his move into apparel design, which came last year and which has been a bigger production challenge than eyewear, he says. As we talk, his sons, who are 11 and 13, are playing old Beatles songs in the next room with a band they’ve just decided to form. Kirk looks out his window across the vineyards of Bordeaux, confident that the move was the right decision. Evidently, so were the decisions of the hippies and the skaters. It seems that there are no insurmountable barriers to becoming an eyewear design success. That is, if one happens to have talent, vision, design sensibility, ambition, dedication and fearlessness. •