The Houston Rockets’ P.J. Tucker became the latest celebrity to announce his own line of fashion sunglasses in a partnership with Temple and Bridges. The announcement was made in early 2021. He joins a long list of others ranging from Paris Hilton to Victoria Beckham and the Olsen twins. What is it about celebrities and sunglasses bearing their names?
It could be a vanity thing. It could be that celebs really cannot find a pair of sunglasses they are happy with. But the most likely reason for launching line after line of expensive shades is this: celebrity sunglasses are an easy way to make a buck. It’s terrible to sound so cynical, but that’s the reality of the fashion world.
Really Cheap to Produce
The thing about sunglasses is that they are really cheap to produce. They are dirt cheap. Most are made with plastic via an injection molding process American manufacturing perfected decades ago. Frames can be produced for mere pennies. Manufacturing lenses is a bit more expensive, but not by much.
If you could mass-produce a product with very little effort and sell it for ten times what you paid to produce it, wouldn’t you be enticed to do so? That’s what it boils down to. And by the way, all those celebrities launching their own lines of fashion sunglasses are not actually handling manufacturing themselves.
Some of them are simply lending their names to products produced by other brands. Others are having white label products produced by overseas manufacturing plants. Then they apply their own brands on top. This is important because, in many cases, celebrity sunglasses are no different from the shades that cost a lot less at the corner pharmacy.
A Smart Financial Move
None of this is to say that celebrities launching eyewear lines is a bad thing. It’s not. It is also not wrong. It’s a smart financial move by people who clearly understand the free market system. They and their partners know that celebrity names sell fashion sunglasses. People will spend a lot more on a pair of shades with a celebrity’s name attached – even if they are not getting a product that is remarkably better than comparable products at a fraction of the price.
At Olympic Eyewear in Salt Lake City, Utah, the goal is to provide American consumers with high-quality sunglasses at affordable prices. They sell more than two dozen brands at wholesale. You will find their brands at retailers all across the country. What you will not find are high prices linked to celebrity endorsements.
Are Olympic and its retailers still making money? Absolutely. Sunglasses are a high-margin product with consistent demand. You might even say that off-market brands, like those produced by Olympic, make more money because they target a much larger audience. They have the advantage of volume over per-unit pricing.
There Is Money in a Name
Getting back to celebrities and their fashion sunglasses, there is no denying that name recognition counts for something. There is money in a celebrity name, both for the manufacturer and celebrity. Why not take advantage of that? After all, this is the land of opportunity.
Tucker will not be the last big-name celebrity to announce a new line of sunglasses. He certainly wasn’t the first. Celebrities will continue lending their names to shades as long as consumers show a willingness to buy the products. It is all part of the consumerism circle of life we have all grown up being a part of. They keep producing new products for us to consume; we keep consuming them.
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