A good pair of glasses can do more than enhance your vision. Options for a range of colors and designs allow users to show their style, while smart glasses add electronics to access social media during a stroll.
A Brooklyn-based startup is out with a brand that uses the basic plastic frame to respond to another demand by tweaking the shapes and sizes of glasses so they fit better for people of color.
Vontelle was created in 2020 by Tracy Green and Nancey Flowers-Harris, who both kept running into problems finding glasses that would fit their face. The startup offers frames with wider bridges, wider rims and longer arms — designed to fit faces with higher cheekbones and a larger or lower nose bridge, our sister paper Crain's New York Business reports.
Vontelle was one of 10 startups out of 4,000 applicants selected for the Future Collective, an accelerator program for Black-owned businesses.
Neither Green nor Flowers-Harris had any background in eyewear before coming up with the idea for Vontelle. They began by taking facial measurements of friends and family and attended an event to survey women about where their glasses hurt.
It took six months to find a molder willing to work with them and $100,000 of their own money, but Vontelle frames are set to begin selling at America's Best Contact & Eyeglasses' 900 retail locations in February.