Popticals presents solution to unwieldy wraparound sunglasses at Vision Expo

Preston Porter at Popticals' Vision Expo display--the vehicle resting atop Popticals cases.

Poptical’s display at Vision Expo last week was big, yet subtle.

The sports sunglasses supplier featured a green, branded dune buggy on a platform, with green-branded kayak and bicycle tightly strapped atop it. But if you looked closely, you could see that all four tires of the buggy were remarkably resting on Popticals’ tiny hard sunglasses cases.

“What’s with all this motor sports, kayaking, biking, hiking?” Popticals marketing manager Preston Porter spieled after pointing out the tiny cases beneath the thousand pounds of sporting equipment. He answered by relating the problems in wearing typical wraparound sports sunglasses that require large and unwieldy storage cases.

“They get scratched and broken!” Porter said, warming up. “There’s nowhere to put them!”

You could keep them on top of your head, he conceded, slighting that solution as “the $200 tiara.”

“But what if your hair’s greasy?” he asked dismissively, then set up “the dirty necktie” method of hooking the glasses onto the middle of your shirt top as his next straw sunglasses man.

“What if you bump into a wall? They get crushed!” Inserting them into your lapel (“the corsage”) chances the same fate, he added.

Indeed, “There are a million ways to break your sunglasses,” Porter maintained. Set them on a table, they fall off—or are forgotten. And forget the “lunch box” sunglasses case, because wraparounds won’t fit there, he noted, and if they do fit in your pocket, well, there’s that crush potential once again.

So Popticals, Porter promised, came up with the perfect solution: premium, high-performance wraparound sunglasses with convenient, compact storage.

The key is a design employing a new patented “micro-rail system” whereby the lenses come apart in the middle, and by way of a rail system built into the frames, slide inward and then overlap parallel to each other, so as to “compact down” and fit into what is essentially a durable half-case shell—also made possible by temples that fold inwards using two hinges. All this allows the sunglasses to maintain their wraparound curved design elements without the bulky storage size.

The frames themselves are made of extremely lightweight, flexible but durable material that bends, but is highly resistant to stress cracking and breaking. The polarized lenses, made of nylon by Carl Zeiss Vision and offering full UV protection, are likewise scratch and impact resistant, and lightweight while offering great clarity; they also use Zeiss’s lens treatment for repelling water, oil and dust.

And to top it all off, the custom hard shell case not only fits in your pocket, it has a carabiner clip for secure carry outside of it.