Oakley's Eye for Design

Based in Foothill Ranch, Calif., and with a corporate HQ designed by its own President, design permeates every aspect of the eclectic eyewear company

by Delphine Hirasuna

Oakley defies conventional beliefs about how to grow a business, how to develop product line extensions, and even how a corporate headquarters should look. But for Oakley, it works. In 2006, the company recorded net sales of $762 million, up 18% over the previous year. In the world of athletics, its eyewear is considered de rigueur.

From the start, Oakley favored revolution over evolution. Founder Jim Jannard was a 25-year-old pharmacy school dropout in 1975 when he pooled together $300 to form a company named after his dog, Oakley, to market a better handgrip for motocross motor-cycles. He made the grip from a new high-traction material he called "Unobtanium" that shaped to the human hand.

The success of the grip spurred Jannard to look at what's wrong with motorcycle goggles as well. Oakley ski goggles soon followed and sunglasses a few years after that. The first products to incorporate lens geometry, Oakley eyewear provided non-distortion lens qualities and precision craftsmanship that high-performance athletes eagerly embraced.

The holder of more than 600 patents, Oakley still puts as much emphasis on its futuristic technology as the look of its products. "'God is in the details,'" says President Colin Baden, quoting legendary architect Mies van der Rohe and claiming Oakley's products are "invention wrapped in art."

Describing Oakley's methodology, Baden says, "We look for problems and we invent solutions from scratch. What we saw in eyewear was that the active outdoor person was not able to get glasses that functioned well in a given sport. We entered the category because no one [i.e., competitors] cared about optics." Baden claims that Oakley eyewear is still unsurpassed. "I could put our glasses up against anybody's, and you would see a superior point of difference. That difference is our juice. We can walk into an account and say, ‘Look, you won't get headaches when you wear these glasses.' Once someone sees and understands that, they are lifelong converts."

To call Oakley an eyewear company, however, is to ignore the eclectic range of its enterprises. "We are a design-driven company," says Baden. "We create things that interest us. When you want to be a company at the forefront, you really can't go into the marketplace and look at what is going on or ask people what they want because all there is is what there is. We are all about what is going to be."

The shock of the new may leave some people uneasy, Baden admits. But for Oakley, living outside your comfort zone is how innovations come about. "The products that we think are the ‘next thing', we call them ‘talking to the people in the front row.' They are the people who get our jokes and can turn around and explain them to the people in the last row. Then everyone goes, ‘Oh, okay.' When our front-row athletes are wearing our glasses strapped to the top of their heads, we sell thousands of them."

Even without such tacit endorsements, Baden says that Oakley would still be driven to explore new frontiers. Indeed, Oakley's office—or "corporate interplanetary headquarters," as it is officially called—looks like a set from "Star Wars". Its bunker-like exterior leads into an equally forbidding vault-like lobby with a torpedo in a cradle on the floor and B-52 ejection seats in the waiting area. The building was designed by Baden, an architect before he was asked by Jannard to head Oakley's design functions in 1996. Today Jannard and Baden are still closely involved in the design process.

"Buildings can be a great vehicle for making a statement," Baden says. "When you come here as an employee, you feel like part of the club. The culture drives the team. That competitive fierceness drives the design features we make. If you are a competitor, you sense that we put a lot of value in what is going on in this place."

What is going on is all of Oakley's design and research and development—and the manufacturing of most of Oakley's eyewear. More than three-quarters of the 417,000-square-foot headquarters is devoted to manufacturing.