Oakley

Oakley, Inc. was the Foothill Ranch, California eyewear company founded by Jim Jannard in 1975 — starting with a motorcycle-grip business run from his garage, then the O Frame goggle, then the Eyeshades and Frogskins sunglasses that made Oakley the defining performance-eyewear brand of the 1980s and 1990s. Oakley traded on the New York Stock Exchange as OO and sold sunglasses, ski and snow goggles, prescription frames, apparel, footwear and backpacks through more than 160 Oakley and Vault stores and thousands of wholesale accounts, before Italy's Luxottica — owner of Ray-Ban and Sunglass Hut, and once Oakley's fiercest retail antagonist — acquired it in 2007 for about $2.1 billion. Oakley is now a core brand of EssilorLuxottica.

Company Profile

The lens technology is the company's founding claim, stated plainly in the summary: High Definition Optics, and a patent estate around lens geometry and materials that let a fashion-priced sunglass be sold as equipment. That positioning — sports performance first, style as a consequence — is why Oakley's wholesale accounts were sporting-goods and specialty stores as much as fashion retailers, and why its own stores were called O Stores and Vaults rather than boutiques.

The Luxottica relationship gives the record its plot: Luxottica's Sunglass Hut chain had dropped Oakley product in a pricing dispute in 2001, Oakley's stock fell, and within six years the same group bought the company outright. Vertical integration — the frame maker owning the brand, the retail chain and, after 2018, the lens maker Essilor as well — is the structure the industry has followed since.

The range behind the name is performance sunglasses, ski and snow goggles, prescription eyewear, and apparel, footwear and backpacks. Its customers are sports and fashion enthusiasts, through Oakley stores, Sunglass Hut, sporting-goods stores and specialty outlets. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Oakley in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing Oakley with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

For current dealings, the snapshot at the top of this page is the place to start: it gives the company's present status — Acquired — Luxottica acquired Oakley in 2007 for approximately $2.1 billion; Oakley continues as a brand of EssilorLuxottica, formed by the 2018 merger of Essilor and Luxottica — and links to the official website, which is where current product ranges, store information and investor or corporate contacts are maintained. Anything in the dated summaries that conflicts with the snapshot should be read as the older position: summaries describe the year they are dated, and the snapshot describes the company as it stands now.

For anyone researching the fashion industry's public-company era, Oakley is a useful case: the garage eyewear maker bought by the retail giant it once fought. The summaries in this section were compiled while the story was still unfolding, which is exactly what makes them worth keeping — they preserve what the company said about itself at the time, before the outcome was known.

History in Brief

The October 2013 summary describes the mature wholesale business: performance sunglasses and ski goggles for sports and fashion enthusiasts, lens technologies including 3D and High Definition Optics, a retail network of more than 160 Oakley 'O' and Vault stores in malls across the United States and in Europe, Mexico and Asia-Pacific, sales online and through Dillard's, Sunglass Hut, sporting-goods stores and specialty outlets, and apparel, footwear, backpacks and accessories for sports enthusiasts alongside the eyewear — noting, as its closing fact, that Oakley, founded in 1975, is owned by Italian eyewear giant Luxottica.