Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Travis Lefevre. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Travis, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I have been ingrained in the eyewear industry for pretty much my entire life and the one thing that alluded me the longest was how eyewear was truly designed and made. Having worked in pretty much every facet of the industry it was only right that eventually I would stumble across the opportunity to make frames. Originally this was supposed to be something reserved for our VIP clients in my own store but it was so well received that we wanted to then start creating our own styles. Once again, that was so successful that I started having other Optometrists and Opticians reaching out wanting to do something similar for their own shops.

That’s when we truly realized that this could be way more than an interesting differentiating factor in our own business. There were next to no options to create your own eyewear styles unless you wanted to buy hundreds and hundreds of pieces of the same styles and that doesn’t make sense for companies that only have one or two offices like my own company had. So we took the principles that had been most successful for us and began offering them as a private label solution to other offices, then we started offering different options to customize each frame, and eventually started offering completely customizable options to build your own brand with your own styles and we are there to help every step of the way.

Travis, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Like I said before, I’ve grown up in the eyewear industry and worked in almost every facet of it at this point. I was lucky enough to be a part of a limited workshop before COVID that allowed me the opportunity to learn how to handmake eyewear and that set me off on a journey of learning how to operate CNC machines, specialized eyewear manufacturing equipment, and programming in various design softwares. And now we help independent Optometrists, Opticians, and Artists create their own eyewear from concept to creation.

Helping small creators is where our true passion lies. There aren’t many options to create your own eyewear unless you have the capital and demand to create hundreds of each style and that’s just not realistic for most of the people we work with. But you’ll find that many of our clients have truly unique ideas rather than attempting to reinvent the wheel like so many brands have done for years and years.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

We handle all of our design and manufacturing in house and that’s one thing that truly makes us unique and allows us to offer our products with small to no minimums. A large part of our journey and growth can be attributed to learning and self teaching new techniques in order to allow us to scale our production. The biggest lesson we have learned while handling the manufacturing ourselves is to constantly try and think outside of the box, this is what helps us find solutions to problems that many people have thought are impossible in the past.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

One story that immediately comes to mind is when we originally started working with one of our fastest growing clients. They have a background as an artist and have incredibly original ideas for producing their own eyewear styles. But most conventional factories won’t take these ideas seriously because of the amount of work on the backend that it takes to bring them to life. So this client had been told no multiple times before they found us. Right off of the bat I wasn’t sure how we would create these, but one of my fatal flaws is my inability to say no and rather work through the issue until we can make come to life. These frames take hours of handwork and experimenting with different tooling in order to bring to life. But now that we have a relatively consistent workflow we are helping them scale and bringing more of their unique creations to life.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lfvreyewear.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lfvr_eyewear/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lfvreyewear/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lfvr-eyewear/