Bausch & Lomb

"Del Vecchio tells, who hardly speaks English, that he went directly to present the offer to the Americans. He did not have an interpreter with him. He still remembers the sniggers in the room of American managers when he formalized the purchase price. At that time, it seemed an enormity. "But I knew the glasses sector well and what Ray-Ban could give me. It would open the doors of any optician in the world. They could not understand that," he tells me. Game over. "Ray-Ban becomes Italian, American Bausch & Lomb sells it to Luxottica," announces the Corriere della Sera on April 29, 1999."

"Leonardo will reach space, conquering the most important brand in the world of sunglasses, which alone controls a third of the global market: Ray-Ban. A legend, which in the Nineties, however, is definitely tarnished. In Rochester, where Bauch & Lomb had invented the Aviators in 1937, lately, they couldn't get anything right. The company is a big sleeping elephant, where no one makes real decisions or it takes months to make each choice, and they are almost always the wrong choices."

"Ray-Ban is essentially synonymous with sunglasses, one of those brands that have become common nouns, like Jeep for off-road vehicles, Scotch for adhesive tape, and Rimmel for mascara. The American company Bausch & Lomb patented the anti-glare Ray-Ban sunglasses in 1937 at the request of aviation ace John Macready."

"John continued to test the limits of man in the sky throughout his life. Planes were becoming increasingly complex, from biplanes flown with the wind in one's face to enclosed cockpits. The requirements of pilots and their eyes changed as well. In an attempt to break a new altitude record, Macready returned to the ground with an irritation in his sight. The old goggles were no longer enough to protect him from the increasingly closer sun rays. He contacted Bausch & Lomb, the optical company from New York State and supplier of lenses for the American army, asking to develop anti-glare glasses that would stop the solar rays. After years of attempts, in 1937 the glasses were ready: the Ray-Ban Anti-glare was born, anti-blinding glasses that banish the rays. They are glasses with a light metal frame, with teardrop-shaped lenses to fully cover the eyes following the face, in mineral glass to filter the solar rays. On May 7, 1937 not just a model of glasses for aviators, called not coincidentally Aviator, was born, but also a myth, that of the quintessential sunglasses. The Ray-Ban. In 1938, Ray-Ban launched the Shooter model: the central "cigarette holder" ring, designed to allow the shooter to have his hands free, is the distinguishing feature."