For casual outdoor types and the dedicated athlete, sunglasses have gone from being an accessory to an essential piece of equipment.
“It’s like wardrobing,” says Kendra Reichenau, senior vice president for N3L Optics, a new sport sunglass retailer in Cherry Creek Shopping Center. “You don’t go running in your wingtips; you want proper running shoes. If you wear your fashion glasses they can fog up or slip down your face.”
The problem with shopping for sports sunglasses is that the lighting in stores typically bears little resemblance to actual sunlight. Athletes face changing light levels and conditions while cycling, running, golfing and climbing, which makes selecting eyewear more a guessing game than a sure thing.
Also, when you try on a pair of dark sunglasses and check your reflection in a mirror, it’s hard to see how you look in them.
N3L Optics thought of these things and more when designing its prototype store, which has been drawing people with displays that include a mountain bike suspended from the ceiling and a giant touch-screen monitor that aids customers in selecting frames and lenses. The glasses in this store are strictly “plano,” industry lingo for nonprescription eyewear.
N3L was developed by Luxottica, the Italian sunglass company that last year bought Oakley. The store name stands for Newton’s three laws of motion (you won’t be quizzed; just recall that Sir Isaac Newton was a 17th-century physicist and mathematican whose work included optics). Other stores are scheduled to open by the end of the year in Florida, Texas and California.
Reichenau says N3L was the vision of Oakley CEO Scott Olivet.
“He felt an authentic sports performance sunglass concept was missing from the marketplace,” she says. “The technology of sunglasses and lenses has improved but there hasn’t been a way to showcase and educate consumers about it. We wanted to create a place where you could learn about lens performance, see glasses in simulated environments, be fit and walk out the door with glasses, all in an open-sell environment” (one where the products aren’t stored behind glass).
N3L sells about 900 frames from 20 brands priced from $75 to $350. Some are Luxottica brands, including Ray-Ban and Oakley, while Rudy Project and Smith are drawn from the sports world. Fashion/lifestyle brands like Prada and Kaenon are also part of the mix.
Denver was a natural test market for the concept, Reichenau says, because of its “highly educated, active, multisport consumer.”
The store aims to appeal to women as well as men, but from its name, which sounds like it could be a model of car or skis, to its high-tech selling aids, it’s very guy-friendly.
At the touch-screen monitor, you can choose a sport, an environment or a price point and and get suggestions on what styles to wear. For example, touch “cycling” and the five top-selling styles will pop up on the screen. You can refine the search by specifying price and gender preferences.
Another feature will let you pick a setting — water, a golf green, a mountainside — and allow you to put different lenses over the environment to see how light is filtered or reflected. The next step is to try on a few of your top choices.
At another station in the store, Newton Explorer, there’s a UV chamber to test how dark photochromatic lenses will get when exposed to bright light. It also has a dial that will blow up to 30-mph wind on your face.
At a third interactive station, customers wave a pair of glasses over the mirror and up pops a picture of them with the brand name, price and other information. You can also take a snapshot of yourself wearing the glasses and e-mail it to yourself or others for approval — or a second opinion.
The interactive features are fun, but “they’re not there to replace staff but to enhance the consumer’s experience,” spokeswoman Riegel Brasseux says. “When you spend a couple hundred dollars on a pair of shades, you want to know how they’ll perform.”
Reichenau says the company learned in focus groups that athletes often bought sunglasses that ended up giving them headaches or eye irritation. “There was a lot of waste.”
She speaks from experience. A runner, she was hitting the streets of San Francisco but not wearing sports frames and lenses until she started working on the N3L project.
After getting fitted with glasses that snugged to her face and cut down on wind, she says she began enjoying her runs more. “I thought, ‘wow, this makes a huge difference.’ ”
Suzanne S. Brown: 303-954-1697 or sbrown@denverpost.com
