It all started 50 years ago when Jim Jannard, a motorcycle enthusiast, started a company selling motorcycle parts out of his car at motocross events. He named this nascent business Oakley after his English setter Oakley Anne.
Soon after, he began developing his own products, starting with a motorcycle grip featuring an ergonomic cam shape design and an octopus tread pattern that he named the Oakley Grip. Five years later, he entered the optics business by creating a protective goggle for the motocross industry called the O Frame MX.
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But the real turning point came in 1984 when Jannard was riding along the Pacific Coast Highway at sunset and saw that the rays streamed into the side of his sunglasses. So he took a coat hanger, Lexan goggle lens and some electrical tape and created a prototype for a sport performance sunglass that he named Eyeshade.
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The business thrived and in 1995, Oakley went public, and then in 2001, it was purchased by Italy’s Luxottica Group SpA for about $2.1 billion.
Today, the Foothill Ranch, Calif.-based Oakley operates as a separate division of what is now EssilorLuxottica. The company continues to be focused on developing innovative eyewear — its most recent category is a line of AI glasses developed in partnership with Meta (which, according to Bloomberg reports, recently invested $3.5 billion for a small minority stake in the Italian eyewear group) — and has also expanded into apparel, accessories and even footwear.
“Oakley is a brand known for innovation and the way we move sports and culture forward,” said Caio Amato, global president of Oakley and the Sports Performance Hub. “Our credo is: ‘We create for the future and deliver to the present.’ As much as we have been born out of the mountain bike and motocross industry, the ethos of the company has always been to redefine the future. It’s basically physics elevated to an art form.”
This weekend, Oakley is hosting editors at its California headquarters for a behind-the-scenes look at the company’s past, present and future.
Amato claimed that over the past half-century Oakley has developed three values that set it apart from other brands. First is authenticity. “Since the beginning,” he said, “Oakley has been born to serve the misfits, the underdogs. The way we choose our athletes and our partners, we always want to show the blood, sweat and tears that their sport and culture bring to the table. To be honest, we lose business because of it: to be authentic means we’re not going to copy whatever is selling. We are going to create our own version of what we think is right.”
Second, he said, is innovation. And third, is the fact that it is “a disruptive brand. We love to do things differently.”
Amato said Oakley views itself as “very rebellious, but in an optimistic way. We are unapologetically authentic.”
The brand is still rooted in sports but lifestyle product has become more important in recent years, he said. “Sports is what we breathe. It’s who we are, it’s where we started. So every single year, we bring two or three innovations for sports that are going to resolve unsolved problems.”
One example, he said, is the company’s high-definition optics lenses. “Oakley was the first brand in history to develop a lens that was optically correct,” Amato claimed. In layman’s terms, before the development, lenses were all created from flat pieces of glass. Oakley created glass that followed the angle of the eye, effectively cutting down on eye fatigue.
The brand today is most popular in snow sports, cycling, surf and skate, Amato said. Although Oakley got its start in motorsports, because it’s based in California, it was embraced early on by athletes playing beach volleyball, surfing and skating. More recently, he said, the brand is seeing football as a growth opportunity. Oakley produces all the visors, or face shields, for the NFL as well as licensed eyewear for the league. Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes is also an ambassador.
“The NFL came to us with a problem,” Amato said. “That was the safety of the athletes, and we turned that problem into a solution and an opportunity.”
When athletes such as Mahomes — and Michael Jordan before him — became ambassadors, it helped Oakley cross over into lifestyle.
“This is the moment Oakley progressed outside of sports towards culture,” Amato said. “But we learned that to be a sports brand that we wanted to be, we needed to take the ethos that we developed for sports and find partners and ways to progress these towards culture.”
That includes Travis Scott, who was just named chief visionary of the company. Under the terms of the deal, the rapper and entrepreneur and his Cactus Jack team will work to push the brand further into the cultural arena. “We opened the door of the bunker for him because he is a creator,” Amato said. “He’s someone who envisions the future the same way we do.”
Oakley also produces prescription sunglasses, an area Amato termed a huge opportunity for the company. “We are not known as a prescription brand, and we even created a campaign two years ago that we still run, that says: ‘And you thought we only did sunglasses?’ Prescription is a very relevant part of our business because people trust Oakley as a performance brand. We just needed to tell them.”
Apparel is a growing part of the business as well. Amato said for the past five years, Oakley has sought to bring the “transformative, disruptive, innovative ethos of Oakley into footwear and apparel.”
Since then, the category has become “a substantial part of the collection,” he said, pointing to a recent collaboration with Brain Dead on footwear that “brought us to the epicenter of culture and subculture. We hope by the 2028 Olympic Games that it’s going to be half of our business. We’re bringing forward some very cool shoes and pieces of apparel.” That includes a Travis Scott collection, some of which the company has already begun teasing.
Amato said to expect some teams in the 2026 Winter Olympics in Cortina, Italy, to be sporting Oakley apparel on the snow as well.
The company has a strong wholesale business with Luxottica-owned retailers, Sunglass Hut and Lenscrafters, as well as some other smaller optical retailers. It operates 183 of its own stores in North America as well as units in other countries where the apparel and footwear are on display along with the eyewear.
He said that while some of the back office operations of the company are run by Luxottica, which does not break out sales for its individual divisions, the parent company gives Oakley management “full autonomy to drive the brand in the way it should be driven.” As a result, its headquarters remain in California and its design team is headquartered there.
The company is also free to sign ambassadors that are right for the brand such as Mahomes, Scott, NBA star Jaylen Brown, skier Mikaela Shiffrin, and soccer players Alessia Russo and Kylian Mbappé, among others.
Looking ahead to the next 50 years, Amato said the goal is to keep trying to create for the future and inviting consumers to be a part of that journey. He pointed to the company’s most-recent innovation, the Oakley Meta HSTN glasses collection, as an example. The glasses have a camera built into the frame, can play music and get responses using Meta AI. The glasses, which retail for $399 and up, launch on Friday.
“We always dreamed about making your eyewear a sort of human amplifying device,” Amato said. “So when we were talking with Meta about how to create eyewear that amplifies human potential, we challenged ourselves about artificial intelligence. Is it artificial? And we landed on a name that it’s actually eclectic intelligence.”
He said rather than using a phone to capture a moment, the wearer can simply say: “Meta, capture what I’m seeing.” Or it can be asked to play a certain musical artist.
In addition, in celebration of its 50th anniversary, the company is debuting the Oakley Ellipse 50th Anniversary eyewear collection. The glasses are shaped like the Oakley logo and are designed to be reminiscent of the brand’s history with the curved lines referencing the aesthetic of the ’90s, a stem jog inspired by today’s bestselling Radar EV, and a futuristic lens shape crafted with PhysioMorphic Geometry, the company said. The glasses are available in a Midas Fleck colorway, with a black lucid treatment and gold details, featuring Prizm 24K lenses.
“The Oakley Ellipse 50th Anniversary celebrates half a century of Oakley innovation by taking the most iconic bit of our branding and putting it front and center as a design element,” said Nick Garfias, Oakley’s vice president of design. “What’s more is it plants a flag for us and our fans about what lies ahead. Oakley designs are about progression and advancement, but just as things will continue to evolve, certain things will remain the same: our DNA.”
Amato summed it up this way: “We believe in being an enabler for you to express yourself and amplify what you can do while doing sports or in your life.”