Just a few blocks from the three-story factory where Mykita eyeglasses are designed, prototyped, and assembled by hand by a team of skilled workers, there’s a world-renowned contemporary art museum currently showing works inspired by Joseph Beuys’s vision of the future. There’s a new bar where fancy hipsters go to sip $15 Moscow mules, and more than a few new luxury condo buildings, which have begun sprouting like weeds in the area in the past five years. That’s about when Mykita moved its headquarters to their current location in the middle of Berlin’s Mitte neighborhood, which is basically the New York equivalent of setting up shop in Soho. It doesn’t actually manufacture from scratch there the metal and acrylic frames that are its signature — the parts are sent up in flat batches from South Germany — but it does just about everything else that’s required to construct and ship out between 600 and 1,000 pairs of glasses per day to the likes of Colette and Opening Ceremony. “It’s a business philosophy for Mykita that everything is under one roof,” says Lisa Thamm, head of Mykita PR, who gave us a tour of the factory this past June. “It’s actually easier that way, especially when your graphics team, your designers, everybody is really into detail.”
Being detail-oriented is also the main requirement, of course, for the workers that bike to Mykita each day to fold hinges and attach nose pads and bend frames to the precise angle to fit your face. But it appears to be pretty much the only one; some of the folks on staff are trained optometrists or specialists who know how to cut a Zeiss lens on a lens-cutting machine, but the rest come from fields as diverse as jewelry-making or ceramics. “They all have the common, defining element that they’re very good with working with their hands,” says Thamm. “They do get in-house training, and then it’s a bit of a learning-by-doing process.” We followed that process from start to finish this summer, documenting it for the slideshow at right before heading back out into the blissful buzz of a sunny Berlin afternoon.
Our tour began here, where completely flat, 3.5-mm sheets full of the brand’s metal frames first arrive at the production facility from Mykita’s manufacturer. The staffers in this room are in charge of punching them out, doing a quality check, and giving them their final shape. “We call this room ‘the front desk,’ because it’s all about the front of the frames,” says Thamm.
Two pairs of the frames in their flattened state. “One of the first steps is rolling them, so they get a basic curve,” she says. “Our craftsmen have to know the exact angles for all our different models.”
The rolling machine, one of many custom tools in use at the facility. “In the beginning, everyone said, ‘Oh it’s not possible for you to produce these frames, they’re too intricate,’” says Thamm. “So we hired a retired engineer from Oldenburg who helped us set up our own machines, and we basically have our own Mykita manufacturing system.”
“The next step is bending back the nosepads and temple pieces,” says Thamm. “We either use this machine or a specific Mykita tool.”
An employee photo posted randomly on the workshop wall. One way the brand lures young craftsmen and creatives to its factory is by encouraging a genial atmosphere: group lunches once a week, a gorgeous interior courtyard with picnic tables, and a wall full of Polaroids in the entrance hall depicting every employee who works there.
More flashes of personality in the workshop room.
Another beautiful custom machine. Mykita’s proprietary process has one big upside, among others, for consumers: no gaudy logos on its frames. “Our logo is our technique,” says Thamm. “You can easily recognize Mykita frames by their shapes, which is because of our techniques. Our hinge is our basic signature.”
A bulletin board full of inspiration and ephemera.
“This is where we cut our lenses,” says Thamm. “We work very closely with an old, traditional German company called Zeiss. They’re the best lenses you can get, and almost every pair of our glasses is equipped with them.”
“Every different pair of lenses gets cut individually, because we’re not just producing one type of frame a day here. Right now, we produce between 600 and 1,000 a day. And of course, every pair is somewhat unique, because there are so many different hands that touch each one.”
The area of the factory devoted to frame temples. “There are seven steps involved, because we have a patented system which works without screws or conventional hinges,” says Thamm. “He’s doing step four, and as soon as he’s done, the temples go on to the next person. The teams here also rotate, so they’re not doing the same thing every day.”
“As we saw before, everything is very flat in the beginning,” she says. “Then we have a unique type of bending that results in a spiral that fits into a little hole on the front of the frames.”
Temple pieces that have been hand-painted and rolled. “We always refer to origami when we talk about our designs, because it also starts as a flat sheet and gets folded into a three-dimensional object,” Thamm says.
“Here we laser into the inside of the temple the name and size of the frame,” says Thamm. “All of our frames have human names.” (Ashton, Dolly, and Lupo, for example.)
A craftsman doing a quality check of the final assembled hinges.
Finished sunglasses ready to be boxed and shipped to retailers, nose pads and all. “We have lots of different nose pads — for example, Asian faces need a thicker, more comfortable nose pad, because their noses are often wider than typical Europeans,” says Thamm. “We have I think more than 28 nationalities working here, so we have people with all kinds of faces trying on frames during the prototyping phase.”
Funny caricatures hanging behind an employee workstation.
A Mykita ad from a past season; New York photographer Mark Borthwick has overseen the brand’s campaigns since 2009.
This is where the design department sketches out ideas and tests prototypes, which the bookshelf in back was full of when we visited. “The cool thing is we have a prototyping shop here in-house,” says Thamm. “If you have an idea in the morning, you can get it made by the afternoon and present it to the team. We make more than 8,000 prototypes each year.”
“This is the office where my colleague Frank makes the prototypes,” she says. “He really tries to make the ideas of the designers into reality. He has a doctorate, so he has a lot of expertise.”
Spraypaint for the frame prototypes.
A spoof ad for Mykita’s Mylon range, a special collection of super-lightweight frames the brand produces using selective-laser-sintered polyamide powder. It put years of research into developing a more wearable surface finish for the material and came up with a patented system that gets rid of the unpleasant roughness associated with rapid-prototyped plastic.
Temples made from colored Mylon; they look almost like wood. One of Mykita’s growing niches is a more stylish take on performance eyewear. “If you look at what’s out there now, it’s very masculine and cyborg-like,” says Thamm. “We thought it would be really nice to start a new segment in the eyewear world which we call Luxury Sports Fashion. Our first collaboration was with Moncler.”
The brand also works in standard acetate, though, which it produces itself in southern Germany. “Acetate gets flexible when it’s heated,” says Thamm. “So the acetate frames get put in a high-frequency oven, and then we use a machine to pressure-form them. After 20 seconds they go into the cold water to maintain the shape.”
The pressure-forming machine.
Another important machine: the workshop stereo, whose CD player appears to get a questionable amount of usage these days.
“The acetate frames also have a special patented hinge,” says Thamm. “We injection-mold two different metal parts, one that’s glued onto the temple (shown here) and one to the front of the frames. The hinge holds them together.”
Glue drying on the acetate frames.
A technician inserting lenses into the frames. “She heats up the material with this machine that’s almost like a hair dryer,” says Thamm. “It makes the material flexible, but you need a certain type of expertise to get the lenses in. Celine is a certified optician, so she’s an eyewear expert. Each material and color requires a different heating time.”
A small container full of nose pads awaiting attachment.
Downstairs, Mykita recently built a small company showroom, which uses the same white metal pegboard that marks the signature interior design of its 10 retail stores. (Pictured here is a recent collaboration the brand did with Damir Doma.)
The newest Mykita standalone store — and its very first in the US, despite other retailers here carrying its frames — is in New York, at 109 Crosby Street in Soho. Make sure to check it out if you’re in the neighborhood!
Talk about the right place at the wrong time: I left Berlin to come back to New York two weeks ago, and thus managed to miss what may end up being the coolest event of the summer, tonight's opening of Keren Richter and Gabriel Kuo's RATS pop-up shop in Mitte. Kuo, who's an art director and graphic designer, and Richter, an illustrator and artist, are both longtime New Yorkers who (like me) consider Berlin as something of a second home; for RATS, they joined forces to bring the German capital a strange sampling of some of their favorite objects and oddities from New York and beyond, everything from Fort Standard bottle openers to Knicks hats to strange souvenirs they've acquired on their travels. If you're in Berlin or headed there, don't miss the chance to visit the shop at Torstrasse 68 before it closes at the end of August. Otherwise, get a virtual sneak peek at it here, alongside an interview with Richter and Kuo about how and why they put the RATS project together.
At the London Design Festival in 2009, Apartamento magazine collaborated with local furniture wunderkind Max Lamb on a show called “The Everyday Life Collector.” The title referred to Lamb’s father, Richard, who had spent more than 15 years surrounding himself with British studio pottery, of which 400 examples were on view. But while age might have given him a leg up in the volume department, it turned out that the elder Lamb wasn’t the only one with the collecting bug: Max, too, admitted to joining his dad at flea markets from time to time and almost never coming home empty-handed. So when we had the idea to start a new column called Inventory — for which we’d ask subjects to photograph a group of objects they found meaningful — we turned to Max first, and he didn’t disappoint. He sent us 10 images of the collections on display in his live-work studio in London, then gave us a personal tour.
An hour east of Venice, in the province of Udine, Italy, three small outlying villages make up an area quaintly known as “The Chair Triangle.” For centuries, the municipalities of Manzano, Corno di Rosazzo, and San Giovani al Natisone have been home to workshops and factories, woodworkers and artisans, tool-makers and sawmills, all devoted to producing the more than 40 million chairs that emerge each year from the region. The city of Udine itself is no slouch in the manufacturing department — it’s home to Moroso, one of Italy’s most storied brands — but the chair triangle is known more for its specialized production and for manufacturers who do anonymous, subcontracted work for the big brands.
