A Sustainable Company Turns Wood Pulp and Cotton into Premium Shades that Rival the Luxottica Monopoly.
Epicstoke is a brand known for successfully crowdfunding unique sustainable products like wallets made from upcycled highway billboard vinyl and hand carved bamboo sunglasses. Now the company is turning the renewable resources cotton linters and tree pulp into cellulose acetate, which is considered the highest quality plastic for eyewear. Like a samurai sword, the plastic is layered into large sheets, folded many times for added strength, and then individually hand carved. As a result, the bio-plastic is strong, lightweight, hypoallergenic, and has a natural soft organic feel. These types of luxurious frames only sold by designer brands have one downside: they tend to be expensive, retailing for $150 at the minimum. Sustainable surf / snow /skate brand Epicstoke is changing that by kicking out the middleman and offering customizable, polarized, and environmentally friendly wayfarer style sunglasses for wholesale prices ($39 per pair) through the crowdfunding site Indiegogo. The goal is to crowd-fund $18,000 dollars in 40 days to make the line of Epicstoke Carvers a reality for consumers, while breaking the current price barrier that many consumers are not able to afford, leaving most sunglasses wearers stuck with cheap petroleum based injection-mold frames that they unknowingly pay hundreds of dollars for something that costs only a couple dollars to make.
“We believe this Indiegogo project is about more than just launching a new product for our brand. The eyewear industry is dominated by Luxottica, which means they can drive up prices without delivering on quality,” says Epicstoke founder Joe Schaeppi. “The quality of our sunglasses is as good as it gets, but we can still deliver at a fraction of the price of Luxottica brands like Oakley, Ray-Ban, or Chanel”.
Indiegogo campaigns operate under an “all-or-nothing” funding model so if the Epicstoke Carvers project doesn’t reach its goal at the end of the 40 day campaign then everyone goes home empty-handed. Be sure to follow Epicstoke on Twitter or Instagram (@Epicstoke) and Facebook to follow their progress and make sure to spread the word to your social media networks. Consider donating as little as $1 to help their project come to life. If you decide to donate more, you will get to pick your choice of frame, legs, and lens colors to customize your very own pair of Carvers while taking a step toward evening the playing field of consumer power over fair prices for high quality products that is lacking in the sunglasses industry today.
Epicstoke is a US based surf / snow / skate brand that creates high quality one-of-a-kind products from sustainable and recycled materials with a mission to insure that every single product has quite the story to tell that not only fits its new owner, but lives with and elevates who you are.
