Kathy Tran-Riese Is Bridging a Gap in the Eyewear Market
Winnipeg-based entrepreneur Kathy Tran-Riese based KayTran Eyewear in 2012, not lengthy after ending her MBA. The firm was a ardour mission: Tran-Riese, who has a low nostril bridge, had by no means been capable of finding eyewear that match correctly. She wished folks with the identical face form—a lot of whom are of Asian and African descent—to have higher choices, so she created these choices herself. In KayTran’s early years, the corporate remained a aspect focus, however demand took off throughout the pandemic and Tran-Riese plunged into KayTran full-time. Actors Jessica Henwick (Glass Onion, Love and Monsters) and Lucy Liu (Charlie’s Angels, Chicago) are amongst these noticed in KayTran frames. KayTran’s assortment is about to double with an upcoming enlargement of its optical choices, and a brand new foray into genderless and males’s designs. We spoke to Tran-Riese concerning the hole she noticed within the eyewear market, and why giving her business time to develop was the important thing to her success.
I’ve needed to put on glasses since I used to be 4, however my entire life, I may by no means discover something that will match my face form. I’ve fairly a low nostril bridge that I inherited from my mother and father, and I even have extensive and excessive cheekbones. When I used to be doing my MBA at Western, I went looking for sun shades and whereas there have been loads of frames on the optical retailer, I couldn’t discover a pair that match me. A retailer clerk informed me that they don’t actually make them for my face form. It was demoralizing. I began to really feel like there was one thing incorrect with my face.
I used to be in an entrepreneurship class that 12 months, and our last mission was to develop a business plan. I wrote a plan to develop a line of ladies’s sun shades tailor-made for Asian facial options and decrease nostril bridges. Lots of people don’t even understand they’ve a low nostril bridge and that it’s why their glasses or sun shades continually slip down their face or sit on their cheeks. They could discover that their eyelashes additionally continually contact their lenses.
After researching what makes conventional frames poor-fitting, I pinpointed three main design modifications to repair these points. By the time I graduated in 2010, I had spent about two years engaged on the eyewear line, however the business isn’t simple to interrupt into. Luckily, by means of analysis on the web, I discovered a mentor to assist me navigate the method—a girl who owns her personal eyewear model primarily based out of the U.S. I flew all the way down to New York to satisfy her and she or he related me with just a few totally different producers who had been within the business for many years.
Related: How Do I Find a Mentor?
With these producers, I prototyped just a few designs—I used to be shocked to be taught they have been carved out of wooden at first—and went forwards and backwards to refine the product for a minimum of a 12 months. We’re an organization primarily based solely on the distinctive options our product affords to folks, so we completely needed to get it proper.
KayTran Eyewear launched in 2012. I pitched unbiased retail shops and went to a commerce present in New York to showcase the eyewear line. We obtained into just a few shops in Toronto, Miami and New York, however I couldn’t maintain that sort of grassroots effort on a bigger stage, particularly in comparison with the conglomerates on the market with massive gross sales groups. I shortly discovered that with a purpose to scale sufficient to be in a considerable amount of shops, I would want numerous gross sales brokers to characterize the road. KayTran was my ardour mission, and I used to be constructing it whereas nonetheless working company finance and consulting jobs. In the next years, a variety of life modifications occurred. In 2014, I moved from Toronto to Winnipeg, the place my husband is from. I additionally had two children and needed to take a pause from work. So I didn’t market the merchandise as aggressively for a number of years—we ultimately pivoted to simply promoting on-line.
But in 2021, we noticed an enormous raise in gross sales. The market had modified: Companies like Clearly and Warby Parker had made clients far more snug buying eyewear on-line. So we relaunched. We went all-in on direct-to-consumer and made our website extra user-friendly. We additionally put a variety of assets into social media advertising and marketing, as a result of we wanted to coach folks about what a low nostril bridge is, in order that they’d know they may have a greater match. After relaunching, we expanded our attain to so many extra clients throughout North America, and have now shipped to over 17 nations, together with Singapore, the Philippines and Germany.
Related: It’s Hard to Make It as a Canadian Fashion Brand— These Designers Are Using Social Media to Help
That 12 months, I lastly left my company job and dove into KayTran full time. Often, individuals who have aspirations to start out a business really feel like they must stop their job and do it full time immediately. But each journey in direction of constructing a business appears totally different. For me, it’s been over a decade now, with pauses and a relaunch. A business doesn’t must be all-in, suddenly—it may be one thing that’s grown over time.
In 2023, our year-to-date gross sales have grown 352 per cent versus 2022. We’ve seen a robust urge for food for low-budget optical and lots of requests for unisex and males’s choices, so to help demand we’re launching our first males’s assortment and our first full optical assortment within the fall. I’ve seen an outpouring of feedback from clients who had struggled their entire lives with out correct becoming frames. They’re relieved to have choices. Loads of them expressed that they felt seen, which was so shifting. That capacity to assist them really feel extra assured about themselves—and to remind them there isn’t something incorrect with them—has made me proud to do that work.
