“Customers want to engage with a vision that goes beyond a product”

Eline De Munck founded the brand in 2015 alongside Bob Geraets, out of the frustration she felt in trying to find the perfect frames for her style.

The eyewear brand is distributed in the UK by The Eyewear Stylist and Peter Allen Eyewear.

OT caught up with De Munck at 100% Optical (1–3 March) to discuss the brand’s goals, collaborations, and inspirations:

Eyewear represents personality

We are a marketing driven eyewear brand. I have a background in media. I was a TV host for more than 15 years in Belgium. I hosted Dancing with the Stars and So, you think you can dance? I was the only young woman on TV in eyewear. I would get a lot of feedback asking where I got my eyewear from.

I decided to found the brand because I felt the same deep-rooted frustration that all these other fellow spectacle wearers felt when they didn’t find the right eyewear for their personality and taste.

I wanted to create something wearable but with an edgy touch – eyewear that is sexy, because in my opinion, it should be. Eyewear is centred in the middle of your face, so it is your most important fashion item because everybody will look at it constantly when they talk to you, so it needs to represent who you are. That was very important for me when starting the brand. We’re not only selling a product, we’re trying to sell a lifestyle – customers want to engage with a vision that goes beyond a product.

Ambitions for acceleration

We want to accelerate in B2B and open new key markets. We are focused on getting the brand known in other countries, which as a marketing-driven brand, is not so easy if you don’t put a lot of money into it. We really need to be smart in how we are doing it – working with the right people, working with independent practices who are working with brands that you cannot find everywhere.

In the UK we are very happy to be working with a 35-year-old company, Peter Allen Eyewear. They really know the business. This is something we’ve learned: you need to work with the right people in the right country because they know the market and how to position your brand in the right way.

Disrupting trends

We don’t follow what everybody else is doing. We try to be disruptive in that way. Our frames have always been more metal driven and we are keeping that. The trend now is for more acetate, but not with us. We have always been more of a metal-driven company and we want to keep it that way, but we are implementing features, such as metal temples with a laminated acetate front so you get some beautiful colours.

We did some 3D printing in a collaboration with Tom Boonen, a world champion cyclist. It is a sports frame, but you can also wear it as an optical or sunglasses. We try to have a broad range in our product so we can target a lot of people with our brand.

In Belgium we are B2B and B2C because we want to show our brand and that we’re independent. We need to be different and tongue-in-cheek – otherwise you don’t get noticed. This way, we can also really understand what people want, how fitting works best, what colours are working, what sizes are working, and what shapes are selling the best. We have a lot of data on what is working and selling so we can share with our customers in B2B.

Data-led designs

We look at the data – what shapes are selling the fastest and how we can implement the shapes in another way. If a full metal frame is the most popular currently, we might look to make a combination frame using the same lens shape, but with a metal temple and acetate. Or we make it more exclusive with more details. We build on what we have. Then we implement new designs. We’re working on a frame with a metal wire core targeted more towards men, for example.

We’re launching a collaboration with Ozwald Boateng, the former head designer of Givenchy for men. He has his own store on Savile Row, in London. We are going to launch a capsule collection with him at the Met Gala (5 May). He is the stylist for Idris Elba, Jamie Foxx, and Naomi Campbell, so they are going to wear the frames on the red carpet.

We try to work in a high-end way, with people we believe have the right fit for our brands.

Playing to strengths

I believe that if you are an independent label, you need to play it smart. Playing to our strengths and dealing with our weaknesses is something we incorporate into the core of the company. I believe that collaborating is very important. Working with other brands who have a different audience and target different people is an opportunity for us.