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In 2017, myself and my girlfriend (now wife!) Sacha started a glasses brand called Ambr Eyewear (we'll get to everambrlater..) from our kitchen table in Dublin.
Our daughter had just been born, we were indoors a lot and were noticing the impact of watching screens more.
We were young, naive and overly confident thinking we could build a product (blue light glasses) and a brand to bring healthier screen habits to the masses. But we did...and it started to get popular.
We moved into this lovely little office you can see here, where I spent many an evening in awe handpacking glasses bound for different parts of the world. We still get that feeling 7 years later.
Lots of wonderful unexpected things happened with Ambr Eyewear, it was an amazing experience for us in our early 20s. We won a ton of awards, we got stocked in some major retailers, we sold glasses in over 80 countries and we even opened a shop in Dublin City.
We became experts in optics and grew our product line - introducing sunglasses and prescription glasses. Things were good...the great reviews kept rolling and it seemed like nothing could get in the way of world domination for Ambr Eyewear.
Pretty much overnight, like many internet brands, sales began to skyrocket. Blue light glasses were a hot product because everyone was spending so much time on screens. We struggled to keep up with orders and the birth of our second, Theo, didn't help matters 😂
But things were good. They were exciting. Ambr Eyewear was reaching levels we never thought possible.
Ambr Eyewear was our first business. We weren't experienced. So when things started getting back to normal and orders began to return to pre-pandemic levels, we weren't quite sure what the best strategy was.
To cut a long (and sad!) story short, we had banked on consistent growth and failed to foresee that 2020-2021 was a freak period of time. This left Ambr Eyewear in a bit a pickle. And it made myself and Sacha decide that we needed to return to "normal" jobs while we figured out what we wanted to do next....
I'm working my way through this story and hope to finish this page over the next few days. Cheers! Dan 03/07/2024