Sunglasses are a necessity during hot weather, whatever country you’re from. And why not get a designer brand? They’re better quality, more respected by people and they can show you have good taste. It is these designer styles that eventually make it down to the cheaper end of the market, having been copied by Chinese factories and mass produced. By wearing a designer pair of sunglasses, you will be at the very cutting-edge of fashion; unlike the masses who have to wait until that design is available as a cheaper knock-off style.
Most decent designer sunglasses are handmade; usually in places like Italy or Japan where very high quality manufacturing plants and highly skilled workers are available. They are constructed with the passion and care that the designer brand demands; with frames being hand-polished, Swarovski crystals being attached one-by-one and stringent quality control. Cartier Sunglasses are some of the highest, most expensive around, of course.
Designer sunglass manufacturers are adamant about protecting their brand. Brands like Chanel don’t allow customers to purchase online, this is to ensure a level of exclusivity and minimise the discounts available to consumers so as not to ‘cheapen’ the brand. This is highly important for these brands, as it’s the name that people know and respect, which stands for the quality. If the name was associated with cheaper sunglasses, the brand would lose out on sales from its core customers.
These brands do not manufacture the sunglasses themselves, generally. They license out their name to an optical manufacturer. This is who takes care of the manufacturing, marketing, distribution and gets the product into opticians, boutiques and fashion stores around the world. This makes sense, as these optical manufacturers have the contacts, infrastructure and know-how to get the products to market a lot more cheaply than if, say, Chanel were to set all this up themselves. From the fashion brands’ point of view, the concern is that quality could be compromised by outsourcing this; however it is something they monitor very closely.
