DANDY'S Eyewear

This story begins in 1974, when TV was only watched in black-and-white. Back then the “occhialari” apprentices were taught to make glasses totally by hand.

Using ancient tools to refine, to retouch and to finish, to align perfectly, to mount the hinges with shot peened rivets, to define the fit.

Temples were smoothened with the scraper to remove the edges and tons of wheels were used to polish the frames for the best shiny finishing.

What a huge but great job it was; and in the evening, at the end of the long day, we were proud of what we accomplished and learned, cause we put a piece of ourselves into those frames

Once you have learned to work by hand, the work was focused to the pantographs for the cutting and shaping of the fronts, and eventually to the hinge machines to make the temples and to the other machinery necessary to bend nose pads.

On Saturday morning, those apprentices with great passion for this work would come to the factory to experiment different techniques and tools.

Those were intense years where we invented and improved all kinds of processing’s, continuously.

Acetate gives great pleasure and is easy be worked, glued, retouched, molded, manipulated. I still remember and I can picture in my mind that time of my life where passion for work was greater than passion for the pure business. Shortly after that a whole series of new technologies, electronics equipment, numerical control CNC centers took place to ease and increase productivity. Physical fatigue has indeed vanished. All different steps or manufacturing are now standardized, flattened. Same milling to make a variety of shapes. Everything is produced with speeded up automation, the time to produce a pair of glasses is drastically reduced. The frames are polished by paint; the silkiness of the natural acetate disappears.

Dandy´s collection is born from passion and expertise that we gained in over 35 years of work; is born from the will to make frames and glasses in a serene and pleasant way.

HANDMADE

The illusory poverty of the product does show on the contrary the complexity and the extra care in every single hand made manufacturing step.

The same concept is also applied on the Dandy’s that are hand tumbled and polished, but of course for these models all the craftsmanship is less visible, being hidden by the gleam of the single piece.

Two different concepts and ways to interpret the product; the same passion and expertise in fulfilling it. Rough Collection comes in limited number of samples: the colors may vary but it might be most probable that we made one sole piece in a particular color.

This is visible by reading the laser engraving on right eye rim that shows total no of pieces manufactured in that sole color.