Why are sunglasses so outrageously expensive?

This is the million-dollar question. In order to fully understand what has caused the eyewear industry so be extraordinarily over-priced, we need to bring up a name you might not be familiar with. Luxottica. 

Luxottica Group S.p.A. was an Italian eyewear conglomerate and the world's largest company in the eyewear industry. It is based in Milan, Italy. As a vertically integrated company, Luxottica designs manufactures, distributes, and retails its eyewear brands, including LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut, Apex by Sunglass Hut, Pearle Vision, Target Optical, Eyemed vision care plan, and Glasses.com. Its best known brands are Ray-Ban, Persol, and Oakley. Getting the hints yet? When some company owns such a huge footprint in the entire industry, a monopoly is born. 

This monopoly is not only horizontal as a supplier and manufacturer, it is also deeply vertical, as we have just mentioned. Retail stores like Sunglass Hut and LensCrafters have to comply with their parent's company's decision when it comes to setting prices. Since they are the dominating players for retail stores for both online and physical stores, the competition is very low. They could raise the price extremely high without sacrificing much in sales volumes simply because people have very few options to buy them elsewhere. 

This is where we come in. We break that framework by introducing more avenues for consumers to purchase. We ship designer eyewear brands like Dior and Ray-Ban directly from our Italian suppliers to your doorstep. By simply removing layers and layers of regional distribution and storage overhead, you could pay way less for the same frame. This is our philosophy, and it is our ambition to one day bring down the price for eyewear in the world.