Frameri Eyewear is like the Mecca of eyewear. With prescription and non-prescription frames being so on-trend, many brands lose out on major business due to Rx limitations. The other downside of the growing industry of optical consumers is that when you do find the frame, they rarely have the lens you want. Does this make sense?
Ok let me put it like this. You see a pair of tortoise shell frames, but they can only put in clear, tinted, or progressive lenses. You, the consumer, want those tortoise shells to be both your clear Rx and tinted Rx sunnies, without the ugly progression. (Ugly Progression – the act of walking into a dimly lit room from a sunny area and your lens maintains a yellowish tint.) No one likes the ugly progression, but with Frameri you can pop-out the clears for the sunnies and vice versa. It’s like having your cake and eating your neighbors. Anyway, we recently met Frameri Founder and CEO, Konrad Billetz, and chatted about Frameri – DUH!
In a pool of where it seems there’s a new eyewear brand popping up faster than Starbucks locations, how did they try to make themselves different? “Our goal was just to change the way people experience eyewear,” Billetz said. “We had to figure out who are target is and we kind of built the brand off of that. The brand kind of represents us, the founders, being crazy and weird and different. But that’s also our product.” Which isn’t the normal way many brands are conceptualized. We tend to think me, me, me, which is fine. Of course if you find something lacking in the stratosphere, surely there are others that need it too. But when you create something and focus on the what others want or need, you build a larger base than say your “competitor” who deals solely with a niche market.
And eyewear isn’t that same of Pearl Vision niche market any longer. The other day, I took an UBER home and the driver was wearing non-prescript glasses while driving. At first I was going to stay mum, but curiosity got the best of me. He said, “It goes with my outfit and people think I look smart,” when I questioned his optical choice. Sure, ok. As much as I disagreed with both points, he proved to be the prime example of the expansive reach a concept like Frameri can cover.
Being not even a year old, everything has remained in-house ensuring the utmost control while cutting down the extra cost driven by the middlemen and error. “We run a very complicated business because do everything in house. We source everything ourselves. We design all our packaging and source all of that in-house. We work directly with the manufacturers in Italy and we run our own optical lab in-house. So when an order comes in we’re actually cutting the lenses ourselves.” Brilliant!
I don’t like shading people, places or things, but I mean, come on. How many companies in any industry can say that?
Frameri starts at $100 a pair, I believe. Actually, don’t quote me on that. Just visit them onlineto find out more.
P.S. “You’re welcome” in advance.