All about style

Workers want safety eyewear to do more than simply protect them from harm. They also want it to make them look good.

If you want to show your new line of safety spectacles to customers today, don’t lead by touting the eyewear’s protective features. Customers assume your product meets ANSI Z87 standards or you wouldn’t show it to them. Today’s workers want protection with style.

“Most of us aren’t too concerned about high fashion when surrounded by splashing chemicals or flying debris, but we wouldn’t choose to spend our day looking like a weirdo in clumsily designed PPE if we had another choice,” says Gary Shumate, president of Chase Ergonomics.

As a result, he says safety eyewear manufacturers are introducing more stylish selections, and items bearing sports and brand logos add to consumer appeal and boost employee compliance.

“Ergonomic design and safety effectiveness can’t be sacrificed for fashion, but they can be included in more flattering styles,” says Shumate.

Today’s customers want protective eyewear to carry the logo of their favorite sports team or NASCAR driver. They demand features such as mirrored lenses, indoor/outdoor lenses, a variety of lens and frame colors and styles, anti-fog coatings and protective coatings to prevent scratches.

For sure, safety eyewear must keep wearers from harm, but it helps if it also makes them look cool.

“If they don’t look good and feel good, people aren’t going to wear them. As soon as their boss turns around, they’re going to take them off. Price and quality are important, but style drives the market,” says Lynn Holley, vice president of national accounts for MCR Safety.

The marketplace has become very style driven, agrees Dave Roll, vice president of sales and marketing for H.L. Bouton. “As a result, the product life cycle has gotten shorter. It used to be that you could run a product for six or seven years and not worry about it. Now, you can run it a year or two and customers demand something new,” he says.  

Style-conscious end-users have kept manufacturers on their toes. Manufacturers are continually introducing new products with comfort features adapted from prescription eyewear products and the cutting edge look of the more style-driven sunglasses market.

For example, H.L. Bouton incorporated a spring-driven hinge into its 6600 and 6700 Series of safety spectacles.

“The spring hinge has been in the ophthalmic market for years but never in safety glasses. So we introduced the spring hinge in a safety spectacle. Now we have two models. It gives you better fit and more comfort. The glasses fit firmer to the face and it can expand,” says Roll.

He says the objective is to make the glasses as comfortable as possible, so workers will keep them on.

“If people like what they’re wearing, if they look good and feel comfortable, they’re more likely to wear it. When I first started selling eyewear more than 20 years ago, people would say, ‘Does it meet the standard? Is the quality good? Is it durable?’  Now, they take the glasses and put them on and say, ‘How do I look?’  If it looks good and feels good, they’ll buy it.”

Comfort was one of the primary considerations when MCR Safety designed the Klondike Metal safety glasses, which utilize a spring hinge and a gel nosepiece that allows the individual wearer to adjust it for comfort.

“I was just with an end-user the other day who complained every day to his boss that his safety glasses left ridges in his face because they were so tight and lacked flexibility. We gave him our new glasses with the spring-driven temples and the difference was amazing. That individual now has protective eyewear that doesn’t give him headaches,” says Holley.

Better quality lenses
Most safety glasses on the market are made from polycarbonate, a flexible, impact-resistant material with about 10 times the strength of hardened glass. Many safety spectacles also feature an aspherical lens first used in prescription eyewear and expensive binoculars and cameras.

Conventional lenses have a front surface that is spherical, shaped much like the surface of a ball. Aspheric lenses have a more complex front surface that gradually changes curve from the center of the lens all the way out to the edge. They provide a better view, are thinner than regular lenses and have a slimmer profile.

MCR Safety’s newest model, called the Desperado, features a dual lens with two separate optically correct centers fashioned to look like a single lens.

“Most users prefer a single lens design. It’s more fashionable,” Holley says. “People like the new design because it gives them the optical clarity they need up and down and from side to side without the frame blocking their vision.”

North Safety’s new N-Vision 5600 Series solves another common problem in the workplace today, which is providing eyewear protection for workers who also wear prescription glasses. The optional RX Insert converts protective eyewear into prescription safety glasses. Wearers simply take the N-Vision product to their eyecare professional to have them copy their existing lens prescription into a lens that fits into the insert.

“We initially designed the Flexi-Fit nosepiece for people that the normal universal bridge did not fit. After doing some research and development, we realized that because the Flexi-Fit was removable, we could put something between the nosepiece and the spectacle that contained prescription lenses,” says Roger Paquette of North Safety Products.

The N-Vision with RX Insert eliminates the need for wearers to find a safety spectacle large enough to wear over their prescription glasses.

“That works, but you have two temples on each side of your ear. To be able to put your prescription glasses within the device, it needs to be very large, which decreases the comfort and increases the weight,” he says.

The biggest objection workers had to wearing safety glasses over their prescription eyewear may have been simply that they didn’t like the way it looked. Now, they have a choice.

This article appeared in the June/July 2004 issue of Progressive Distributor magazine. Copyright, 2004.

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