Helsinki · since 2020
Lounge & Lenses
Five people, one bench, 28 pieces, and a rule that a frame is not listed until six of us have worn it for a month and written down what went wrong.
Five people, one bench, 28 pieces, and a rule that a frame is not listed until six of us have worn it for a month and written down what went wrong.
In the winter of 2019 our founder, an optical technician by training, bought a pair of +1.5 readers at a petrol station on the road north because she had left hers at home. They were fine. Better than fine: lighter than her own, and nobody could tell the difference across a table. The hinge gave up in March.
The idea was to make the petrol-station pair properly: the same honest shapes, the same low price where the material allows it, but a riveted hinge, a measured weight, three sizes instead of one, and a page that tells you what the frame is bad at. The first four frames went on sale in 2020. The bench is still in the same room in Helsinki.
The name is the two places the frames are meant for: a sofa and a screen, indoors and out.
6 × 30 days
Before a frame gets a product page, six of us – two narrow faces, two average, two wide, one with a low bridge – wear a sample every day for a month. We weigh it on day one. We note the day a hinge first feels loose, the day a nose pad leaves a mark, whether it slides when we look down, and whether it survives a bag without a case. The weight and hinge type on each page are what we measured, not the supplier’s sheet.
Then the frame goes to a friendly optician across the city, who glazes a pair with a real prescription and tells us whether the demo lens shape gave her any trouble. If it did, the shape changes before anything is sold.
Hinges, mostly, and plating. A moulded pin hinge on a cheap sample will loosen inside the month; a riveted one will not. Thin gold plating on a nose-pad arm shows steel by day twenty. Those samples do not become products, or become products with the drawback written at the top of the description.
A month on six faces is not two years on yours, so the guarantee covers the things we can predict – hinges, screws, nylon cords, coatings – for 2 years, and leaves out the things we cannot: being sat on, left in a hot car, or cleaned with a sleeve.
That a screen lens does anything for eye health (it reduces glare and filters part of the blue spectrum, full stop). That readers replace an eye test. That a frame is “unbreakable”, “scratch-proof” or “lifetime”. If a sentence cannot be measured, it does not go on a product page.
The position, in full, because it matters more in eyewear than almost anywhere else.
No name, no model number, no size code. The three numbers you might want are on the product page and in the fit guide. A frame should not advertise who made it.
No etched mark in the corner of a sun lens, no sticker, no watermark on a demo lens. A lens is for looking through.
Every frame is drawn by us from the measurements up and named for what it is: round, square, half-rim, oval. Nothing here is a version of, a tribute to, or “inspired by” another maker’s design, and we will not describe it that way in an email either.
No sub-labels, no collaborations, no “designed with”. The cases and cloths are as plain as the frames. The company name appears once, on the invoice.
Send the three numbers from inside a pair you own, or the width of your face at the temples, and we will tell you which size and which shape – including when the answer is the cheapest one.
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