The glasses suddenly turned red. This is probably the biggest thing that has happened in the luxury industry in recent years.

One piece of evidence is the growing number of fashion bloggers you can see sharing photos of wearing glasses with different frames on social apps like Instagram. Wearing different shades with your everyday outfit is not a new thing, but optical cat eye prescription glasses are different.

In movies and TV series around the world, taking off frame glasses has been a key part of women's beauty, self-confidence and temperament. At the very least, it's almost impossible to find a case study in which a woman becomes beautiful when she wears frame optics. Finding a pair of optical glasses that suits your face and does not conflict with your dress is a testament to the fashion blogger's ability to judge beauty and fashion. Then this new fashion concept will gradually influence the young people who frequent social networking sites.

The difference between optical glasses and sunglasses is that it almost reveals the whole cheek, rather than the face shape, color, and expression can be shielded like sunglasses, which means that the wearer needs to consider more makeup style matching - not only to make wearing glasses look less dull, but also to make the visual effect of the face more delicate or rich personality.

The change in the definition of fashion has led luxury brands to move quickly. For example, Kerings, the world's third largest luxury goods group, took back the Gucci brand authorization from its agent Safilo in 2016 and set up a Kering glasses company to take over all aspects of the entire industry chain from design, research and development, production, marketing to channel distribution. Because the original 20-year license contract was terminated two years early, Kering even paid €90 million in compensation to Chevrono. This says a lot about the determination of luxury brands, and of course further validates the increasingly important fashion position of the eyewear product category.

Luxury brands recycling product glasses agency, is not an easy thing

The key is that luxury brands have historically not had a sophisticated eyewear manufacturing process. This is why, after the withdrawal of the license, Kering signed an additional agreement with Chevrono for up to four years to help Kering's eyewear industry get on track.

This is also why the newly established Kering Glasses is more of a startup within the Kering Group. Kering Group officials interpret this as a "new business model." In the same year that Gucci announced its separation from Chafferino, Kering hired its CEO Roberto Vedovotto and creative director Massimo Zuccarelli directly from the latter. It took Kering just two years to expand from four employees to 340, and in less than a year it launched nine new eyewear lines. Next, Kering's Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney glasses will be manufactured and sold by the company. "Kering Eyewear's goal is simply to make the eyewear category an important category at Kering." Roberto Vedovotto points out.

But the increase in scale is not the essence of the problem. So far, there has not been a real explosion in Kering's own products. In Negrao's words, it's already a very crowded market.

Although eyewear is being given higher expectations as a fashion accessory category with increasing attention, it is like any business line of luxury brands, there is no set formula. "If you do, you can make hits forever. Obviously that's not going to happen." Miguel Negrao explains, "You can see the glasses that have become popular in the market, and there is little in common between them."

This is bound to be a tough test for luxury brands. According to Negrao, the production cycle for a luxury eyewear often takes more than 20 days, and all the work that begins with the design usually begins between 12 and 18 months after the glasses hit the shelves. Even the world's second largest eyewear manufacturer, Chafferino, has only five major eyewear studios that can hand-craft these luxury items in a limited amount of time. In a way, it's like luxury brands can tell the story of leather goods and ready-to-wear very well, but it's almost the same for watches. The most important marketing tool for luxury brands is storytelling.