Shades of green: the sunglasses firm taking on fast fashion

This arti­cle is part of our Going Against the Grain series, which tells the sto­ries of com­pa­nies bold enough to break busi­ness norms and try out new ideas. To explore the rest of the series, head here.

When sun­glass­es mak­er Sun­God achieved B Cor­po­ra­tion Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion at the end of August, it under­scored the company’s efforts to pri­ori­tise sus­tain­abil­i­ty.  

B Corp sta­tus is one of the high­est mark­ers of sus­tain­abil­i­ty in the busi­ness world. To achieve the dis­tinc­tion from the non-prof­it organ­i­sa­tion B Lab, a busi­ness must demon­strate high social and envi­ron­men­tal per­for­mance and make a legal com­mit­ment in its cor­po­rate gov­er­nance to bal­ance the con­sid­er­a­tions of all stake­hold­ers in its actions. 

Sun­God earned its cer­ti­fi­ca­tion after a rig­or­ous 20-month process. The Ver­bier, Switzer­land-based sun­glass­es and sports eye­wear spe­cial­ist is now a triple bot­tom-line busi­ness in its arti­cles of asso­ci­a­tion, says co-founder Ali Watkiss, mean­ing it must bal­ance the prof­it with the company’s social and envi­ron­men­tal impacts.  

“We have to put the plan­et and peo­ple on a lev­el foot­ing with prof­it when we’re mak­ing deci­sions,” he adds. “It means we always have to think about the wider impact on all the stake­hold­ers to make sure that we’re doing the best thing for every­one involved.” 

Ali says the B Corp process was “all-encom­pass­ing” and “dug into every part of the busi­ness”. It’s also helped to for­malise many inter­nal process­es. Onboard­ing rules were once writ­ten on paper, while perks like after­noons off in the win­ter months for ski­ing were shared by word of mouth; these are now prop­er­ly record­ed. He says this will help main­tain the com­pa­ny cul­ture as the busi­ness scales.  

“It’s been a long but very fruit­ful process, which has actu­al­ly helped us to ele­vate and pro­fes­sion­alise the busi­ness,” says fel­low co-founder and wife Zoe Watkiss. 

Sunglasses for life

The mar­ried cou­ple say the main moti­va­tion for start­ing Sun­God was to chal­lenge the sector’s throw-away cul­ture. “When we start­ed there were real­ly two options for con­sumers. There were the expen­sive Oak­ley-style pairs and then at the oth­er end of the mar­ket there were the fast-fash­ion prod­ucts that peo­ple wear for a cou­ple of days before dis­pos­ing of them,” says Ali. “We set out to build a busi­ness that sat between the two, to cre­ate a prod­uct that was built to last and that was­n’t at all fast fash­ion.” 

Although the sun­glass­es indus­try is rarely con­sid­ered among the largest con­trib­u­tors to car­bon emis­sions, the impact of fast fash­ion means many pairs go to waste each year. Accord­ing to Sta­tista, 768.7 mil­lion sun­glass­es were pro­duced in 2021; this is expect­ed to grow to 901.4 mil­lion by 2025 as demand increas­es. 

Sun­God sought to set itself apart from oth­er indus­try play­ers from its incep­tion. A key dif­fer­en­tia­tor is that all its sun­glass­es come with a life­time guar­an­tee. If any of its prod­ucts are ever bro­ken, the cus­tomer can send the item back to be repaired. “We realised that when a pair of sun­glass­es breaks, it’s prob­a­bly only one com­po­nent that’s bro­ken; it’s waste­ful to throw the entire prod­uct in the bin,” Ali says.  

Zoe admits her risk pro­file doesn’t match that of her hus­band but is glad he con­vinced her to com­mit to the life­time promise. “I think it was a fan­tas­tic cred­i­bil­i­ty dri­ver to actu­al­ly demon­strate that we’re doing things dif­fer­ent­ly,” she says. “It’s pow­er­ful to be able to say it’s been in our DNA since the begin­ning.” 

The com­pa­ny only pro­duces sun­glass­es with ‘clas­sic designs’ to avoid fash­ion fads. It uses recy­cled mate­ri­als in the frames, doesn’t allow returns, doesn’t offer dis­counts and only makes its prod­ucts avail­able direct to con­sumers.

The deci­sion to pre­vent returns is “very anti-fast fash­ion”, says Ali. “That also helps us reduce the impact because it’s pret­ty dam­ag­ing to ship items out to cus­tomers and back again,” he adds. “With some fast fash­ion brands it’s cheap­er to destroy returned prod­ucts than to repack­age them.” 

Sun­God opt­ed against stock­ing its prod­ucts in retail stores, a com­mit­ment that was also made in the inter­ests of sus­tain­abil­i­ty. By going direct to the con­sumer, it makes it eas­i­er to offer a life­time guar­an­tee. What’s more, the com­pa­ny can pro­duce to meet cus­tomer demand, rather than to stock up retail­ers, and the jour­ney between sup­pli­ers and retail­ers is also cut. 

“It’s a much sim­pler mod­el and a sim­pler sup­ply chain as a result,” Zoe explains.

The sustainable advantage

Zoe admits it can be hard­er for a small busi­ness to hold itself to a high­er stan­dard than much of the rest of the indus­try. How­ev­er, she says that every deci­sion the com­pa­ny has made in the inter­ests of sus­tain­abil­i­ty has also been a good busi­ness deci­sion. 

Ulti­mate­ly, they hope the changes they make can help set the indus­try stan­dard as the busi­ness grows. Ali thinks there’s only a “shal­low recog­ni­tion” of the impor­tance of sus­tain­abil­i­ty from some of the indus­try lead­ers. This left room for a chal­lenger brand like Sun­God to come in and “shake it up a lit­tle bit”, he adds. 

While many of these big­ger com­pa­nies have set ambi­tions of being car­bon neu­tral by 2025, Sun­God can claim to be car­bon neu­tral since its incep­tion, after back­dat­ing and off­set­ting all its his­toric CO2 emis­sions last year. 

“The big­ger we get, the more impact we can have; it means we can set an indus­try stan­dard,” says Zoe. “Obvi­ous­ly we’re a long way from being the same size as some of the big brands, but if we can make a com­pa­ny like Oak­ley change, that would be our biggest suc­cess.  

“Get­ting to that crit­i­cal scale is an excit­ing place to be because it means we can demand change with­in the indus­try and peo­ple will increas­ing­ly start to lis­ten and change their behav­iour.”

Tak­ing the sus­tain­able route hasn’t always been easy. Sun­God pre­vi­ous­ly used vir­gin plas­tics in its glass­es, but has recent­ly devel­oped a new frame mate­r­i­al made from 100% recy­cled mate­r­i­al. Although the new mate­r­i­al is cheap­er to buy, it’s more com­pli­cat­ed for the man­u­fac­tur­er to use as it requires more pre­ci­sion with injec­tion tem­per­a­tures and the speed of the mould­ing machines.  

The co-CEOs hope that the busi­ness can now lever­age its grow­ing brand pow­er to encour­age its man­u­fac­tur­ers to be more sus­tain­able. “We know work­ing with recylced mate­r­i­al caus­es our man­u­fac­tur­ers headaches,” Zoe says. “But it’s where our busi­ness is mov­ing, so we need them to come on board with us on that jour­ney. Some­times that takes a bit of explain­ing and con­vinc­ing to do.”

Changes in con­sumer behav­iour make the process eas­i­er. The pair believe SunGod’s sus­tain­able cre­den­tials are key to the cus­tomer loy­al­ty that the busi­ness enjoys. “It’s part of the val­ue propo­si­tion that peo­ple are buy­ing into. I know as a con­sumer I’m think­ing twice about where my mon­ey goes. I think that is part of why peo­ple are choos­ing us over oth­er brands,” Zoe says. 

Ulti­mate­ly, Ali believes SunGod’s com­mit­ment to sus­tain­abil­i­ty has been repaid in terms of cus­tomer loy­al­ty, employ­ee sat­is­fac­tion and brand recog­ni­tion. “I see sus­tain­abil­i­ty as a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage, not a dis­ad­van­tage.”