I've been following the success of Oliver Goldsmith since meeting Claire Goldsmith, the current MD, about 5 years ago. She'd recently relaunched the family business after it had ceased trading in the early 80s. In it's hey day Oliver Goldsmith had helped to redefine spectacles from necessary utility to fashion accessory. I caught up with Claire recently to discuss the progress of the brand and what's next.

Whenever I pick up a magazine these days there seems to be a write-up about Oliver Goldsmith. Known for their attention to detail, timeless designs and handmade production, they’re widely regarded as one of the world’s most iconic eyewear companies. They also have the honour of being the first sunglasses company to appear in Vogue.

It originally started out in the 1920s. Claire’s grandfather then ran it from the 30s to the late 70s. These were the glory years for the brand. She credits her grandfather for many of the successes: “He made sure Oliver Goldsmith got out onto the right faces in the world”. She talks about how he noticed that cinema was becoming a thing people did in their evenings. It was making huge stars out of the likes of Michael Caine and Audrey Hepburn.

Claire says, “He put two and two together and thought, if my glasses were on Audrey Hepburn, lots of people will want to wear them”. Quite an ambitious thought considering at the time Oliver Goldsmith was a small family business with one shop on Poland Street in Soho. He somehow managed to get in with the editors of the glamorous fashion mags and from there moved onto screen.

It led to collaborations with Givenchy, Dior and Vidal Sassoon on films like Breakfast at Tiffany’s and many others. You get a sense of this when leafing through the pages of the visitors book in Claire’s Notting Hill store. It’s a cliché to say but it reads like a Who’s Who of 20th Century celebrity – Grace Kelly, Peter Sellers, Michael Caine, Audrey Hepburn. The list goes on, not to mention Morecambe and Wise and the Two Ronnies.

Towards the end of the 70s, Claire’s grandfather handed over the reins to his two sons. It led to a pretty turbulent patch spanning the early 80s. Both brothers had differing views on how to run the business. It also timed with the market hotting up and brands like Dior, Chanel and Gucci licensing themselves to the big manufacturers (today being Luxol and Safilo). The market shifted, everyone started buying the big brand names leading to a huge drop in Oliver Goldsmith sales. The culminating pressures eventually led to the business being separated. Not the best news for the brand perhaps. One brother took over the specs business and the other the sunglasses arm. Not long after, Claire’s father died and the sunglasses part he was running ceased trading. The specs business continued on a bit further under the wing of Claire’s uncle but never got back to the heights of the 60s and 70s. A cautionary tale I guess of how quickly things can turn sour. Claire now looks at the 20 year period that passed from 1985 to the relaunch as a godsend: ‘It took that amount of time for people to recognise the quality that goes into something handmade.’


The glasses, worn by the likes of Audrey Hepburn and Michael Caine look just as cool today as they did back then. Claire talks about Oliver Goldsmith being timeless, but to be fair there’s also a fair mix of the eccentric (downright bonkers) in the archive that look like they belong more to the set of a Stanley Kubrick film than on anyone’s face. They made some brave design decisions back then and judging by the all-white suits the family wore at tradeshows in the 60s, they seemed to be having loads of fun. They were part of the first wave that took something utilitarian, that belonged to the drab back streets of post war London, a world of opticians and chemists and made it a thing of pleasure, a fashion accessory. The more radical the design, the more the world questioned the very notion of one pair of spectacles for all occasions. That would never do.

When Claire came to put together her first collection she carefully selected the range from her uncle’s archive. Stored away in the attic, he had meticulously filed away every press cutting and every pair of glasses they had ever made. She edited the collection down to 20 frames made up of a number of ‘timeless’ everyday pairs mixed in with a few statement pieces. To get the first set of prototypes made her uncle put her in touch with one of the original Oliver Goldsmith factories that were still in business. Based in Clapton-on-Sea, the small factory was mainly surviving on the repairs business. Claire laughs about the reaction when she turned up at their door, saying ‘Oh no, not a Goldsmith’. Many of the workers, now in their late 60s and with slightly shaky hands knew her father and grand father. After 20 years, the factory went back into production, handmaking the first collection for her to take
to retailers.


The first order came from an optician in Hampstead. Starting small, they’ve gradually grown. With more and more press enquiries and increased interest from overseas, the production shifted from individual, one by one orders in Clapton-on-Sea to a slightly bigger production facility in Japan. It must have seemed that Oliver Goldsmith was back. They were already attracting celebs, including the likes of Robbie Williams, Daniel Craig and Jude Law. The company was growing steadily and attracting more and more attention. All was going swimmingly until things hit a rocky patch around the Lehman Brothers collapse when all the markets were in meltdown. Claire had just placed a big order with the factory in Japan for the entire year’s collection. By the time it came to paying up, the pound was flagging terribly against the Yen and Oliver Goldsmith was once again facing closure. She refers to that time as being the most stressful yet. They had to take a massive loan from the bank which wasn’t easy when nobody was lending. Perhaps what makes Oliver Goldsmith different today is that Claire is first and foremost a business person. She didn’t get back into the family business lightly. She’d planned to relaunch the Oliver Goldsmith brand years before she eventually did. In true apprenticeship style she applied for a job as PA to the CEO of ITV Digital, Robert Fyfe. He’s now CEO of Air New Zealand. Claire talks about her pitch to him, she was over qualified for the role but said, “If you can teach me how to run a business, I’ll be the best damn PA you’ve ever had”. She got the job and Claire refers to him as the best mentor she could have had especially when it came to doing things differently. She’s full of admiration for what he’s doing at Air New Zealand, “It’s a national carrier that behaves like a small brand like Oliver Goldsmith or Innocent”. Two years with Rob gave Claire a strong grounding in running a business. ‘“You’d be amazed at the systems and processes we have in place for a business of our size”. When they eventually got the loan, the bank had pored over every part of the business. No stone was left unturned according to Claire. She now looks back on that time as a positive endorsement: “We must have been doing something right”.

In 2008 she moved production to a specialist factory just outside Venice. Today they’ve got around 500 stockists globally, including a small collection in Margaret Howell’s flagship store on Wigmore Street. Two complementary Brit brands if ever there were. Today Claire sells Oliver Goldsmith alongside her own collection. Taking her name, Claire Goldsmith, it has a clear design lineage back to Oliver Goldsmith. It launched in Jan 2009 and it’s more seasonal than Oliver Goldsmith, changing annually with 4 collections. It’s aimed at a slightly younger market, early 20s, and starts at a lower price point, from £200. Launched just over a year ago, the Claire Goldsmith brand is doing well accounting for 50% of overall sales.


So what’s next. She’s going to focus on the retail side and has an ambition to open a store in New York one day. It’s a key market for them. At the beginning she set out with two clear ambitions. The first was to have a stationery cupboard and the second to make Oliver Goldsmith a global brand. She’s accomplished the former and is well on the way to achieving the latter. When asked what she’d look back on she says, “resurrecting a dead brand that’s back for good”. Claire was pretty fortunate to have a brand to resurrect in the first place. What’s more it came with a pretty amazing story. Double bonus. But Claire’s success is in making it a business first. Bringing a level of professionalism to the family operation that had been lacking in previous generations. It’s testament to the fact that even the most glamorous of businesses need prudent management if they’re planning to stick around. From what I’ve seen, Oliver Goldsmith is here to stay.