Glasses are the most important thing you wear. We treat them that way.
Spunky Specs is a Brooklyn eyewear label hand-curating independent designer frames from Tokyo, Milan and Copenhagen — then cutting them with precision prescription lenses starting at $79. The fit and finish of a $600 optical boutique, shipped to your door at roughly a third of the price.
An optician and an engineer got tired of the same twelve frames.
Spunky Specs began in 2019 in a Kent Avenue studio, the year Mara Voss — a practicing optician who had spent a decade fitting faces in three different Brooklyn shops — and Daniel Rhee, an optical-lab engineer, both noticed the same thing. The independent frames they loved were getting squeezed off shelves by the same handful of conglomerate brands. The good stuff was still being made, but no one was carrying it.
So they started doing it themselves. Seven years later, 47 of us curate frames from 38 ateliers across 11 countries, cut and mount lenses in our Brooklyn lab in under 48 hours, and ship to 41 countries. The whole thing runs on a quietly stubborn idea: eyewear is wardrobe, not medical afterthought.
The shelves of every big optical chain look identical. Ours never do.
No Luxottica frames on the shelf, ever. Instead, we travel to small workshops in eleven countries and bring back what they're best at — Japanese titanium, Italian acetate, Danish minimalist hardware — and refresh the floor with two seasonal drops a year.
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01
Acetate with a name and a place
Most of our frames are milled from cotton-based acetate poured in Mazzucchelli, Italy — the same family-owned mill that's been doing it since 1849. Every colorway is named for the river or street near the workshop where it was developed.
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02
Hinges that survive real life
Every frame passes a 12-point hinge and stress test in our Brooklyn lab before we ship it. The industry average is four checks. That's why our 2024 defect rate is 0.8% — down from 2.1% before the Milan upgrade.
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03
Small-batch drops, twice a year
Two seasonal drops per year — Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter — with roughly forty limited pieces per atelier per drop. When a colorway sells through, it's gone. We don't reorder identical stock to fill the page.
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04
Lenses cut where the frames live
Frames ship from the atelier, lenses are precision-cut and mounted in our Brooklyn lab in under 48 hours — beating the industry 7–10 day average by 84%. You get boutique fit without boutique lead time.
Try them on in a real shop before you buy.
Spunky Specs is stocked in 14 independent brick-and-mortar opticians across the US, UK and Canada. Walk in, sit down, push the frames around. The optician behind the counter knows the collection as well as we do.
The people who make our frames, and the people who can't yet afford a pair.
Eyewear is a strange product. A good pair of glasses can change how a stranger treats you on the subway, and a missing pair can keep a kid out of school for a year. We try to take both halves seriously.
For every twelve pairs we sell, we donate one pair of reading glasses to VisionSpring, who distribute them through last-mile vision programs in places glasses rarely reach. To date, that's 14,800 pairs — and counting on every order that ships today.
On the operations side, we became a certified B-Corp in 2023 with a verified score of 94.7, which means the audits cover our lab, our suppliers, our packaging, and our pay — not just a logo on a footer. It's a working standard, not a trophy.
What customers and press actually say about us.
- GQ
- Refinery29
- The Strategist