Ray-Ban

"The American acquisition of 1999 also made it known to the general public overseas: the Italian Luxottica, already listed for almost a decade on the New York Stock Exchange, buys a run-down Ray-Ban for 640 million dollars with an offer that outmaneuvers the main interested competitors, including the rival Safilo, who already thought they had the brand in the bag."

"The battle plan is simple and impactful: Ray-Ban ventures into prescription glasses to fill the void left by Re Giorgio's frames. New significant licenses are secured, Versace and Prada in 2003 being the most significant. It works. Luxottica recovers quickly."

"Ray-Ban, like Persol and dozens of the most famous luxury brands from Armani to Prada, is part of the lines produced by Luxottica under the careful guidance of an entrepreneur who, if he had been born in New York, would fully represent the American dream of the self-made man."

"YOU started from nothing, you conquered everything you could dream of: you climbed to the top of the world in the sector you had entered as the last of the workers, you rang the bell at Wall Street, you bought Ray-Ban – all of Ray-Ban –, you're the richest man in Italy, you have a Rolls-Royce, a Ferrari, a yacht in Monte Carlo, a villa on the French Riviera, buildings across half of Europe, a charming villa in typical Caribbean style in Antigua, you have a new partner – the third –, you have a newborn child with her and another on the way, in addition to a child of not even ten years from your previous wife and three grown children who are living their lives. You are approaching your seventies."

"my. Ray-Bans become the glasses of heroes, the American pilots, who parade through the Italian cities liberated from Nazi-fascism in 1945. The fashion of pilot glasses invades postwar America, movie stars turn them into legend. The first is Marlon Brando, who sports Aviators while riding his motorcycle in the 1953 film The Wild One. The list is long, the girls of my generation all fell in love with Tom Cruise, who flaunted teardrop-shaped glasses in Top Gun in 1986, a movie that brought them back into fashion, increasing Ray-Ban's sales by 40%. But it's not just Aviators that become iconic, the Wayfarers with the black plastic frames become immortal after the Blues Brothers. It's not only the actors who turn Ray-Bans into a myth. The most American glasses there could be, as we have seen, become a natural accessory for the President of the United States: from JFK's to Joe Biden's Aviators."

"Del Vecchio relaunched the brand starting, as always, from the product. At the time of acquisition, Ray-Bans were purchased for less than 30 dollars in American discount stores. Leonardo transformed it into a luxury brand, expanding the range of products and introducing them into the corrective lenses market. It sells about fifty million Ray-Ban frames every year, more than ten times as many as when it bought the company for a price that seemed crazy to many competitors. Not to him."

"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."

"Del Vecchio also brings the brand back to the eyeglasses sector. Complicit in the breakup with Armani, he transfers the collections towards the Ray-Ban world."

"Sales go from five million a year up to over forty in a few years, an exponential growth rate. Ray-Ban shines and transforms into an all-around luxury brand."

"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."

"They start with the machinery, which is rebuilt and modernized. Then they begin to study the brand's values, the style, they analyze all the past models they can find, Ray-Ban didn't even have a real archive. For a year they practically withdraw the brand from the market, selling the pieces they find scattered in various factories, and that's about it. And then, in 2001 they are ready to start again."

"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."

"They move everything with three trucks to Pederobba, where Ray-Ban had a small factory. An entire truck is stolen by an American employee."

"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."