Network of Eyeglass Brands
- Lauren Curry
- Oct 16, 2022
- 4 min read
Updated: Sep 17, 2024
What are the best-selling eyeglass brands? If you're like me, you might have wondered this same question.
I have wondered this almost every single time I have gone out and shopped for a new pair of glasses. Like many, I go to the most popular optical stores in Ontario such as LensCrafters, Hakim Optical, Pearle Vision, Clearly, and Iris. Many of which, separate and organise their eyewear collections into popular brands they sell. This of course makes it easy to see what pair comes from what brand. I am most curious about how many optical stores sell certain brands of glasses, and if there is a pattern. This is what I intended to do with my network of popular eyeglass brands.
As an eyeglasses wearer I was curious about which eyeglass brands are most popular and sold the most amongst popular optical stores.
This is because I have found that while some eyeglass brands become increasingly popular others seem to become less popular. I have seen this with a pair of glasses that I picked out around 3 or 4 years ago that were Persol, which seemed to be popular at the time, and is now quite hard to find. My prescription had changed and I needed to get a new pair of glasses and while I was shopping to find another Persol pair, they were nowhere to be found. This led me to wonder which brands were popular and selling more than others. As I did my research for this network I planned to create, I found that the most popular selling brands in the 5 most popular optical stores in Ontario were Ray-Ban, Coach, Oakley, Micheal Kors, and Versace.
I made sure to place these brands in the middle of the network so that it was easy to see that they had the most connections amongst the optical stores, as shown here...
Why are these brands popular?
When I finished my network I wanted to know more. So I researched what relatively was the most popular eyeglass brand in optical stores. After looking at a Guardian post I read that “Ray-Ban is the most valuable optical brand in the world,” (Knight, 2018) as it produces around 2 billion dollars in sales.
Why Ray-Ban?
Ray-Ban sunglasses, which survived World War II, became an iconic fashion product after the war and soon became popular worldwide as a military item.
Ray-Ban sunglasses gained popularity in the mid-1980s when Tom Cruise donned the classic aviator sunglasses in the movie Top Gun. Ray-Ban has been the world's best-selling glasses brand since its founding with its consistent high quality and elegant design as the keys to its success. I was not at all surprised by this as it was the brand with the most links in my Network
How was this different from the timeline and map?
The network I have made is quite a small scale of what is being asked. On a larger scale with more research and time it would be a lot more successful if all of the optical stores in Canada or the United States were represented in this network. This would be revealing as it would show not only the most popular brands, but if not all the most eyeglass brands in North America and South America. This would be more factual and instructive about which brands were most popular through how many links they had that connected them to optical stores. It would take into account more stores and brands showing greater connections for a wider and more informative visualisation.
When I was creating the timeline, I wanted to create something that was visual in showing how eyeglasses and contacts came to be what they are now over time. I picked the most relevant events in history and added it to the timeline. I thought that creating the timeline was quite organised and simpler than both the map and the network I made. This is because it was linear and I was able to organise and understand the layout easier and what I was trying to say. When creating the map I wanted to show where popular eyeglasses brands originated from. This was harder for me to make as I had to narrow it down to only a few brands so that it didn’t get too complicated. However, I still felt it was a bit confusing and complicated as a map isn’t as organised as a timeline because a map just shows points on a map and you need more context to know what the visualisation is trying to do.
When I was creating the network I took a while to know exactly what I wanted to tell the viewer. I wanted to make sure that it was clear and informative. So, I wanted to show how popular certain eyeglass brands are by the amount of connections they had to popular optical stores. Thus, how many optical stores sold a certain brand. I used most of the same brands of eyeglasses from the map in this network. When creating this network it turned out quite well in showing which brands were most popular as they had the most links. Although it was informative it lacked a bit in clarity as it was a quite small scale of what I was trying to show. This also led to asking why some brands were more popular than others, and why optical stores decided to sell these certain brands. This is what led me to finding out that Ray-Ban is the highest-selling eyeglass brand right now. When I was finished with my network I was quite satisfied with the outcome, as it was informative and comprehensible. It made me question why certain brands are popular and sold the most, while also giving me a sense of understanding of how certain links work to make a product successful.
References
Clearly 2023. Designer Glasses. https://www.clearly.ca/glasses/brands
Hakim Optical 2023. What Frame Brands are Available at Hakim Optical?
Huang, Z, Weng, S. (2022). Brand Image and Consumers: A Case Study of Ray-Ban. Journal of Education, Humanities
and Social Sciences, Volume 1, https://drpress.org/ojs/index.php/EHSS/article/view/650/583
Iris. Shop By; Brands. https://iris.ca/en/tous.html
Knight, S. (2018). How one giant company will dominate the way the whole world sees. The Guardian.
LensCrafters 2021. Shop designer eyewear brands https://www.lenscrafters.ca/lc-ca/brands#middleContent
Pearle Vision 2023. Discover Ray-Ban, Oakley, Vogue & More. https://www.pearlevision.ca/pv-ca/lenses
Comments