As the premier optical tradeshow in North America, Vision Expo East always has more than its fair share of first time exhibitors. 2014 was no exception with dozens of companies across all facets of the optical industry bringing their wares to the Big Apple for the first time.
Among the more notable debutantes on the frames side of the event was Shwood. As the name suggests this US company primarily specialises in the design and manufacture of eyewear made of wood.
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‘We started back in 2009,’ explains Ryan Kirkpatrick, president at Shwood. ‘Eric Singer, the creative founder of the brand, is an artist who mainly works with wood. One day he realised he could make a pair of sunglasses from a tree branch. So he cuts down the branch, takes some cabinet hinges off the wall and goes down to the corner store and gets a pair of sunglasses to use for lens parts. In three days he created a pair from just those materials and, because his friends soon wanted pairs too, he kept making them as a small fashion project. Around that time is when I met him and we decided to start a company.’
Today the frames are hand made at the company’s base in Portland, Oregon and reflect the active outdoors lifestyle associated with the Pacific North-West area. Wood is still very much the dominant material but new developments like the Fifty/Fifty collection pair it with materials including titanium.
‘Our tagline is “Experiment with Nature”, lots of our frames are named after beautiful places in Oregon and everyone who works for us likes to hike, camp, canoe and all the other things you can do in nature,’ says Kirkpatrick. ‘The eyewear is all about showcasing the beauty of the natural world; the outdoors really influences the ideas of our designers.’
At the moment Shwood mainly sells into the top tier of the fashion market but this first appearance at Vision Expo East marks a desire to move into other areas.
‘High-end fashion is our major market and we thought we would come here [Vision Expo East] to see who we can do business with in the optical market that occupies a similar space,’ comments Kirkpatrick. ‘The original product story was very much about Eric’s inspiration and artistry with wood. Now we are moving into new materials and concepts. We’ve got frames made out of baseball bats and frames made out of wood mixed with stone. We have 45 people in our workshop every day constantly experimenting and all passionately driven to innovate materials in eyewear.’
Kirkpatrick also sees some benefits in being relative outsiders to the optical industry. ‘We keep our design and development team on their own. There’s no question of looking at other companies for inspiration – we’ve got too many ideas of our own.’
Social conscience
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141 Eyewear is a young company, which like Shwood is based in Portland, Oregon, that gives a pair of glasses to a person in need for every frame they sell.
‘That’s at the heart of what we do,’ comments Kyle Yamaguchi, co-founder of 141 Eyewear. ‘When we were looking at setting up the business back in 2009 we decided that this was very important to us. We are a for-profit company that aspires to do the right thing and the way we can do that is by making cool and popular eyewear.’
In New York 141 was introducing its Ultem line.
‘The big thing with our Ultem frames is the Ultem plastic material itself. It is incredibly durable, lightweight, temperature resistant and is eco-friendly as well. It has done very well at the show so far as it is so different to anything else out there.
Making its inaugural appearance at Vision Expo East was Lucky Selectism New York. Originally from South Korea, Heewon Kim founded the company in 2010.
‘I have some manufacturing connections back in Asia and saw the opportunity to add something new to the frames market in the US. People sometimes think that product manufactured in Asia must be inferior in some way and I wanted to show that is not the case. The exceptional quality of our product shows what can be achieved if you use the best people.’
Lucky Selectism unveiled several new frames at Vision Expo East.
‘The key to the design of the new collection is in the texture and the edge of the frame,’ comments Kim. ‘The new frames like Byron and Annette have a highly controlled and refined look. Subtle changes to shape and a delicate touch in the details are what stands us apart.’
Wildfox is a popular and established fashion brand in the US with designs skewing to a young female demographic. The eyewear range came online two years ago and matches the fashion side in terms of design and appeal.
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‘Eyewear is relatively new to us,’ comments Kristom Parson, director of public relations and marketing at Wildfox. ‘We do everything relating to the frames ourselves – there’s no outside licensing. The clothing company is very fun, very youth driven, very feminine and very romantic. We’ve played with those themes in the eyewear design and I think the eyewear skews to a wider age range than the clothes.’
For now the Wildfox collection is dominated by female acetate sunglass models, with a smattering of unisex shapes and metal frames.
‘We use quality Italian acetate and top quality components and the eyewear is priced to allow people to make a fun purchase,’ says Parson. ‘We have some very wearable classic shapes and some over the top shapes. Blue and green mirrored lenses are huge at the moment.’
Generally, Parson says, it is the over the top designs that sell the most with the Bel Air model a top performer that generates a lot of press coverage through celebrities wearing it.
New York stalwarts Bevel’s latest collection sees the company taking a turn for the adventurous.
‘We are generally heading in a funkier direction at the moment,’ comments Richard Mewha, co-founder and president of Bevel. ’Over the past couple of years the collections tended to be quite conservative; because of the bad economy people were generally a bit more conservative in their tastes. Now people want to have some fun again, which is definitely good news. We do rely on opticians to present our products – we don’t have a huge brand name – so we look to produce frames that get the opticians excited and spreading the word.’
The majority of the new pieces were in 3mm titanium, with some utilising acetate or a combination of the two materials. The various frames are all named after songs.
Mewha highlighted Denis (of Blondie fame) as his personal favourite of the new designs.
‘As the designer of the collection I just love this frame in horn blue. It is bold, modern and has a great colour combination. The joint materials of matt acetate and titanium create a really rich effect too. When I’m working on the design of the frames I don’t get to see the colours combine together so it is always something of an unknown how they come together. In this case I was delighted with the result.
Other highlights include Arabellla, named after the Artic Monkeys song, and Layla, so called after the song first recorded by Derek and the Dominoes.
Light and colourful
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Eyewear company Modo was founded in 1990 in Soho, New York, so Vision Expo East is always an important show for it.
‘Expo East is a home from home for us at Modo and we always bring new products to the market here,’ comments Rosemarie Mueller, publicist at Modo.
This year the big launch was the new Paper-Thin Titanium line, which is an addition to the Modo brand collection. The frame weighs in at a mere 6.8g and features bold colour choices via a TR 90 Ultra front. There are six shapes within the line with each available in four colour options.
‘The frames are constructed out of our beta-titanium 153 material which is only 0.6mm thick. This helps make the frame so light and allows for exceptional wearability,’ says Mueller. ‘The metal is flexible and can adapt to the wearer’s face. The pop of colour via the elastic polyamide front really makes the frame.’
Robert Marc’s new collection, A Hamptons Life, is inspired by the eponymous East Coast collection of seaside villages located close to New York City. The women’s collection features solid fronts with abstract mixed temples in a variety of new colours including tortoise blossom, tulip, corn field, blue hydrangea, Hamptons tortoise and grey gardens. Meanwhile the men’s collection incorporates matte and shiny finishes in black tortoise gradient, matte navy, vintage cognac, vintage tortoise and graphite.
