Sunglasses tend to fit into two categories – wonky £5 jobs off a petrol station carousel or big-name shades that’ll set you back £200 a pair. Given a choice, we’d all pick the latter, but how much of that meaty price tag is just the brand name and marketing dollars?
If you want to know the answer, check out the superb sunnies from long-standing WildBounds favourite, Sunski. In terms of build quality and materials, Sunski shades are top-tier – backed up with lifetime warranty on the frames and a superb, subsidised lens replacement service – but the price is half what you’d pay for more famous brands.
Style-wise, their inspo is gloriously wide-ranging – from the 1960s Liz Taylor-inspired Biancas and Steve McQueen-esque 70s Shorelines to their Almost Famous-style Makanis. Whether you’re after a pair of Astra aviators for your Land Rover dash or some surf-style Dipseas for a sea-kayaking trip, you’ll find a pair of Sunskis to suit you.
Not bad going for a brand that started out with a chance find at an Australian surf shack…
Sunski founders Tom Stewart and Michael Charley graduated from Columbia University in 2009 with a business concept that they reckoned was going to disrupt the market and make them rich overnight. But it wasn’t sunglasses.
It was, in fact, the ‘Salsabol’ – a lipped ceramic sauce bowl designed to stop you getting the table messy when you were dipping Doritos. Originally sketched on the back of a napkin in high school, the boys worked hard to bring their dream to the light of day, and 2011 found them sharing Tom’s childhood bedroom at his mum’s house and packing orders in the cellar.
Somewhere along the way, they moved to Lake Tahoe for the skiing and then San Francisco for the surfing. One suspects the lifestyle may have been more fulfilling than the business. A photo from the era shows them pimping their wares at some trade show or other, looking slightly disconsolate in comedy Mexican sombreros and t-shirts that read ‘PROTECT YOUR SALSA’.
Funnily enough, the venture did not make them millionaires (though if you’re suddenly feeling like there’s a Salsabol-shaped hole in your life, you can order one off their website). But it taught Tom and Michael to be ‘scrappy and resourceful’, and also hammered home some of the things they didn’t want out of a business. For example, unpacking their first shipment of 3,000 Salsabols from China to find that 2,000 of them were defective was a valuable lesson in buying things from the lowest bidder.
All of which stood them in good stead for their next venture.
A couple of years earlier, Tom had taken a bit of time out after his architecture degree for a three-month surfing trip in Australia. In the small town of Forster, New South Wales, he came across a seasonal beach shack selling off flamboyant deadstock 1980s sunnies from an Aussie brand called Sunski – so he bought a few pairs and they quickly became his signature look.
It’s the kind of founding myth that sounds like it was dreamed up by a marketing team – but at the time, Tom was just rocking his own personal style without any thought of turning it into a business. Remember, the future was chips ‘n’ dips.
Sometime in the spring of 2012, however, as it was rapidly becoming apparent that the future was not chips ‘n’ dips, Tom and Mike were kicking back on the beach after a morning’s surfing when the buyer from the local surf shop told him his sunnies were ‘rad’. This wasn’t the first time the Sunskis had drawn compliments. In fact, Tom’s colourful shades had been so widely admired by his surf mates that he’d toyed with the idea of importing them.
Alas, when he started looking into it, Sunski had gone out of business more than 20 years earlier, and even that original surf shack in Forster had now sold out of their final few frames. Sunskis were well and truly extinct.
Most people would have left it at that, but Tom was in an unusual position. As an architecture student who’d done an internship in digital fabrication, he had experience in 3D modelling – and a couple of years in the sauce bowl game had given the salsa bros plenty of know-how when it came to dealing with suppliers, materials, import paperwork and all the other complications of modern-day manufacture.
So while they couldn’t buy new Sunskis, they could make them instead. With $273 left in the kitty after the Salsabol experiment, they decided to try a crowdfunder.
‘Sunskis are vintage Australian sunglasses that were nearly lost to the pages of history,’ they announced on their Kickstarter on 9 July 2012. ‘We’ve set out to bring them back!’
Actually, they were bringing them back better. The five-layer polarised lenses were mirrored and scratch-resistant, with extra-powerful UV protection for ski and surf. The frames used the strongest and lightest polycarbonate materials they could afford, with flexible arms for an ultra-comfortable fit.
As Tom told Outside magazine a couple of years later:
‘We got lucky. Our initial price was $30. At that time, there were two tiers for sunglasses: $10 no-name cheapos or $150 and up. Nobody was doing branded sunglasses between $30 and $60.’
Within three days, the Sunskis were funded, and by the time Tom and Michael closed the crowdfunder, they were on a whopping $157,000. They sold 15 times more pairs than anticipated, and the resulting economies of scale allowed them to upgrade both frames and lenses.
This runaway success came with complications too. The supplier took a lot longer to fulfil the larger order, and the resulting shipping container full of shades had to be freighted by sea rather than air. A spot inspection of their import paperwork by the FDA (the US Food and Drug Administration) nearly derailed their Christmas deadline, but Michael’s sister got drafted in at the eleventh hour to help them pack and post 5,000 pairs of shades. By mid-December 2012, Sunskis were out in the world once more.
Since those early days, Michael and Tom have introduced a lot of new styles – catering to smaller faces with models like the Avila and Vallarta, and going big and bold with styles like the Hunter S Thompson-inspired Foxtrots. But they’ve also made a lot of refinements to their frames and lenses – many of them in response to feedback from their ever-increasing community of Sunski aficionados.
Among the biggest changes was the development of their very own ‘SuperLight’ recycled plastic resin. While there were loads of post-consumer recycled plastics out there, the strength and flexibility simply weren’t good enough for high-performance eyewear – plus they really wanted to source their raw materials from the US rather than importing them.
So they spent three and a half years developing a new material themselves. Since 2020, all Sunski frames have been made out of post-industrial plastic scraps from a medical device facility in Illinois, converted into pellets then re-synthesised into flexible, durable SuperLight resin.
As for the lenses, they’re ultralight and scratch-resistant triacetate cellulose (TAC) polarised polycarbonate, and some premium models use upgraded CR-39 polycarbonate for improved clarity and durability.
Robust as they are, the lenses are always going to be the most vulnerable element of your sunglasses, and with active use they’re bound to pick up some scratches sooner or later. For this reason, Sunski offer a huge range of replacement lenses with different tints, gradients and coatings. The kits are inexpensive and easy to install at home.
They might look the part, but Sunskis are more than just fashion sunglasses. They’re genuinely built for adventure, and even their ‘Everyday’ sunnies are designed to cope with the trials of trail and tide.
For more demanding environments, they also produce an ‘Alpine’ range with grippy rubber nose pads and removable magnetic sun shields offering maximum wraparound coverage. One of the core models in the Alpine series is the Treeline, and it’s a testament to their build quality that they’ve become popular with outdoor professionals in the US, including ski patrols and wildland firefighters.
In fact, during successive wildfire seasons, Sunski donated 1,000 pairs to the US Forest Service, and the online reviews from firefighters are superb. ‘The side shields are kinda nice for running saw,’ writes one user on Reddit. ‘Nice change from the dogs**t $6 shaded safety glasses they give us at work’, opines another.
Campaigns like this are nothing new to the guys at Sunski. They’re genuinely good eggs trying to run their business in a responsible way, whether that’s helping out in times of crisis or working to improve their sustainability.
Alongside their recycled frame materials and solution-dyed recycled cases (which reduce water waste), they’ve also made sure their origami cardboard packaging is completely free of single-use plastic. They’re a certified climate neutral brand, and since they started out in 2012, they’ve been members of the 1% for the Planet scheme, donating one percent of sales to environmental charities. In Sunski’s case, that means they’ve stumped up over a quarter of a million dollars so far.
They’ve supported worthwhile causes from indigenous youth leadership to LGBTQ inclusion, campaigned on climate change, and produced free safety goggles for frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Here at WildBounds, Sunski has been a core brand in our range for a long time now. Members of our team regularly wear Sunskis on their own adventures, and we’re big fans of the company’s whole ethos – from quality and pricing to style and sustainability.
As co-founder Michael Charley explained once in an interview,
‘Our entire business is driven by word of mouth. Provide a good quality product at a good price that people want to talk about, and the sales make themselves.’
Oh, and they still swear by the Salsabol.
