Big Lens: Inside the £36 billion monopoly behind your favourite sunglasses
Cover your eyes — how a 20x markup became the sunglasses industry standard
There’s a good reason why every lifestyle brand aspires to have its own line of sunglasses — It’s very big business. The global sunglasses market is now valued at $48bn (that’s approx. £35.89 billion) a year. Although some are increasingly high-tech, sunglasses are relatively easy to make, ship, store and display. They don’t come in different sizes, are often unisex and the mark-up is considerable, sometimes 20 times what a pair costs to actually make. You read that right: 20 times.
But while the name on the frame may be familiar, the companies that make most of the sunglasses you’ll see in the shops are less so. Most people will not have heard of the likes of Marcolin, Safilo, De Rigo, Thelios or EssilorLuxottica. Yet these few companies are the ones behind sunglasses (and optical glasses) from the likes of, respectively, Zegna, Adidas and Tom Ford; Marc Jacobs, Boss and Levi’s; Givenchy, Christian Dior and Fendi; Police, Chopard and Porsche Design; and Ray-Ban and Persol, as well as Chanel, Prada and Armani. That’s to name just a few.
One name stands apart: EssilorLuxottica - a company created by the merger of Essilor, French lens manufacturer and inventor of the varifocal lens, and Italian sunglass manufacturer Luxottica in 2018.
It is an empire of such size it dominates a very comfortable majority of the global eyewear market. Much as the control of the digital tech industry by a small number of enormously powerful players would be referred to as Big Tech - much as with Big Pharma or Big Oil - so commentators have even referred to the similar situation in eyewear as ‘Big Lens’.
Thinking big
Critics have complained that Luxottica’s sheer size means it can act as what economists call a price maker - able to set prices as high as it thinks its consumers can take, without competition to force prices closer to the cost of manufacture.
Tim Wu, then professor of law at Columbia University, once noted how the typical progression for most industries is for their products to get better and cheaper. Yet, strangely, sunglasses seem to remain pricey year after year.
Never assume that you have arrived, or look at the world as your only point of reference.
Leonardo Del Vecchio
Perhaps Luxottica deserves its de facto monopoly. Marking its 65th anniversary this year, the company was created as a manufacturer of components for spectacles in Agordo, Italy, by Leonardo Del Vecchio, then just 25 years old. But he had radical intentions from the outset: if ophthalmic glasses and sunglasses were, at the time, typically assembled from parts made by many different small workshops, Del Vecchio wanted his company to be able to make all parts and assemble all of its products in-house. Luxottica would in time become the industry’s first vertically-integrated company.
It was, perhaps, the first to think globally too. “Never assume that you have arrived, or look at the world as your only point of reference,” as Del Vecchio would jokingly say of his determination to think big.
Certainly, over the next 50 years he would set his company on a course of rapid growth, progressing from making parts to entire frames, buying other manufacturers, signing licence deals with fashion brands, opening factories from Brazil to China and, later, merging with the biggest lens manufacturer too, Essilor.
It would scoop up brand after brand too, both retail chains - in Brazil’s Orticas Carol and in the US Target Optical and LensCrafters are all owned by Luxottica, as is Sunglass Hut - and also other sunglass makers.
Having control of a large chunk of sunglass retail meant Del Vecchio was able to demand lower prices from the brands it carried or threaten to slash orders, or even replace them with its own products. That’s what happened with Oakley in 2001, causing the company’s value to drop by a third, before it was finally bought - by Luxottica - outright in 2007.
Designer takeover
Persol? That’s another brand owned by Luxottica. Oliver Peoples? Ditto. Ray-Ban? That’s theirs too, a brand acquired through some tough business moves.
When Luxottica was negotiating the purchase of the struggling Ray-Ban in 1999 it promised to keep open its US manufacturing plants; three months after the deal was done, Luxottica closed them, and moved production to China and Italy. But it also slashed Ray-Ban’s distribution, greatly improved the then declining quality of its products, pushed up prices by some 50% and turned it into what would become the world’s most valuable eyewear brand.
Del Vecchio would show time and again that he knew what he was doing. Indeed, while debates could be had as to whether it’s good for business that Luxottica is so dominant, it’s fair to say that it’s because of the brand both that the sunglasses industry is so huge, but also that you’re likely to have several pairs and probably have your eye on more.
Del Vecchio also drove the potential for sunglasses not just to carry the names of the industry’s historic specialist manufacturers, but that of fashion brands too - Luxottica could make them, while the fashion brands would drive demand and cream off some profit from their sale.
Luxottica might not have been the first to do this - in 1968 the Italian designer Emilio Pucci signed the first eyewear licensing agreement with Safilo, and the following year Christian Dior struck a licensing deal with Carrera.
But it was Del Vecchio who really took the idea and ran with it, realising that the power of a brand would allow Luxottica to charge much more for what were fundamentally the same frames, in terms of the materials used and costs of production.
If, at this time, people thought the idea of doing that on an optical pair of specs was odd - these were still widely regarded as being medical aids - Del Vecchio realised they had no such qualms about sunglasses. In 1988 Luxottica signed with Giorgio Armani. The idea snowballed from there: Luxottica would, over the years, go on to make sunglasses for over 150 other brands.
Golden Balls and golden handcuffs
Just how lucrative the market for licensed sunglasses would become is demonstrated by the way brands and sunglass makers negotiate for the better deal, like footballers in a transfer window. Armani, for example, was with Luxottica for 15 years before, in 2003, deciding to go to rival company Safilo, and then in 2012 went back to Luxottica. And more recently there’s been a trend for lifelong golden handcuff deals: three years Marcolin signed the first of these, a deal with the fashion designer Tom Ford, and in 2024 Safilo signed a similar deal with David Beckham.
When brands are also celebrities - like Beckham - these also become the perfect vehicles for the promotion of the product: a celebrity might get away with wearing a pair of their sunglasses on the red carpet, or at night snapped coming out of a restaurant, in the way more humble folk could not.
This isn’t to say that all Luxottica and the other giants of the sunglasses industry do is buy in a well-known brand to slap on humdrum products. Luxoticca alone runs an annual R&D budget that is several times larger than the rest of the industry combined too, leading the company to pioneer many of the processes used in sunglasses production.
Together with Essilor, it’s the company behind photochromic lenses, for example - the ones that adapt to available light conditions - and, more recently, has developed connected glasses for Meta together with Ray Ban; under the Oakley brand it has created some of the toughest, lightest and most aerodynamic of sunglasses. As with most tech, here it also tends to filter down to more everyday styles.
But all that nonetheless leaves Luxottica very much in control of the sunglasses world, with the only way its effective monopoly is likely to be bust is by consumers recognising if they’ve been overcharged and taking their money elsewhere. And, indeed, there are still independent opticians, while the online space, and companies the likes of Warby Parker in the US, increasingly provide scope for some fight back.
Luxottica tends to counter that many billions of pairs of sunglasses are made every year in which it plays no part at all; that most of the brands it makes for it does not own - so ‘monopoly’ has to be applied loosely. And yet there’s no question that few industries are quite so ruled by one name as is sunglasses. Keep that in mind when choosing your next pair.
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