Italy · since 2019
Shade & Siesta
A small company on the Adriatic coast that makes sunglasses the way an optician would describe them: by the numbers, with the drawbacks written down, and with nothing on the temples but acetate.
A small company on the Adriatic coast that makes sunglasses the way an optician would describe them: by the numbers, with the drawbacks written down, and with nothing on the temples but acetate.
Our founder spent a decade buying sunglasses from photographs. Some were too wide, some pinched, one pair of very expensive acetate frames slid down her nose for an entire summer. None of the websites had said how wide the frame was, because none of them had thought she would ask.
So in 2019 she set up a company that would. The first four frames were drawn in a flat above a bar in Pesaro, cut by an acetate workshop forty minutes inland, and listed with their lens width, bridge, temple length and weight before they had a photograph. The photograph came later. The numbers were the point.
We still sell by the numbers. If a sentence on a product page cannot be measured, it is probably a drawback, and we write those down too.
6 wearers · 30 days
Before a frame gets a product page, six people with six different faces - narrow, wide, high bridge, low bridge, one who cycles, one who leaves everything in a hot car - wear it for a month. They write down where it slides, where it pinches, when the temples loosen and what the lens does to their phone screen.
That notebook becomes the “Before you buy” section on each page. Acetate warms and loosens: a wearer found that out in a July car park. Polarised lenses blank a petrol-pump display: the cyclist did. Mirror coatings scratch: three of the six managed it in the first fortnight.
Mostly hinges and coatings, not fronts. A hinge screw that backs out by week two, a mirror that lifts at the edge, a nose pad that cracks. Those frames go back to the workshop and do not get listed until the part is changed.
We guarantee hinges and lens coatings for 2 years because that is how long we have watched them for. A number we have measured is worth more to you than a word we have not.
That a frame is “unbreakable” (thin steel bends, acetate chips), that a lens is “scratch-proof” (mirrors in particular are not), or that one shape suits every face. If it cannot be measured, it does not go on a product page.
The one thing about our frames you will notice by its absence.
No name, no initials, no metal plaque. The inside of one temple carries the three fit numbers and the tint category, printed small, because you need them. That is all.
No etched mark in the corner of a lens. A lens is for looking through, and an etching is one more thing to catch the light.
Every front is drawn here and cut to our own pattern. We name shapes by what they are - square, round, pilot, cat-eye - and nothing on this site is offered as a version of another company’s design or sold under anyone else’s name.
Acetate fronts and temples are cut and tumbled inland from Pesaro; steel frames are bent, plated and assembled near Belluno. We are at one or the other most weeks.
Tell us your face width, whether your nose bridge is high or low, and whether you lose sunglasses or sit on them. Those three answers decide most of the range, and we will answer straight — including when the right pair is the cheaper one.
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