Eyeconic Optiek and the courage to stand alone.
Let’s start here:
If your store needs brands to give it an identity, you don’t have one.
This industry is crowded with spaces that look interchangeable same layouts, same assortments, same logic. The difference between one shop and the next is often nothing more than square footage and discount strategy. When a store outsources its personality to the product, it enters a dangerous game.
Because once you play that game, price becomes the loudest voice in the room. And price matching isn’t strategy, it’s erosion.
You devalue the product. You flatten the experience. You slowly dissolve your own brand image. And at some point, you have to ask the uncomfortable question:
What image are we actually protecting?
Eyeconic Optiek chose not to participate in that race to the bottom. From the outside, Eyeconic reads like a well-curated optical store. Spend time inside it and it becomes clear this is something else entirely. Eyeconic is a brand that happens to sell eyewear, not the other way around.
That distinction is everything. The best stores don’t ask how to appeal to everyone. They decide who they are first and let the right people recognize themselves in it.
Coming to Optical From the Outside
Frank didn’t grow up in optical. And frankly, that matters.
His entry point wasn’t retail it was care. Eye health he worked in a hospital first. He embarked in the human responsibility of helping people see better. Only later did he step into optical stores, where he noticed a pattern almost immediately: uniformity disguised as professionalism.
Most stores looked the same. Felt the same. Sounded the same.
Frank is an ’80s kid. A product of a time when subcultures weren’t marketing categories they were lived identities. Style mattered. Music mattered. Architecture mattered. You felt things when you walked into spaces.
In our conversation, we laughed about how a single moment like seeing Ginuwine in a music video wearing Timberlands could permanently shift your sense of style. Those moments imprint. They stay with you. They teach you that expression isn’t accidental it’s intentional.
So when someone with Frank’s appreciation for fashion, design, food, and rhythm went looking for a store that matched his energy… it didn’t exist.
That absence became the idea.
The Right Partnership Changes Everything
Enter Daan the yin to Frank’s yang.
Daan grew up in the industry. He understands the backend, the margins, the operational nuance that keeps a shop standing long after the doors open. Where Frank brings culture and instinct, Daan brings structure and precision.
This wasn’t a romantic leap without a net.
It was alignment. They didn’t sit down to design a store and then step into roles. They built Eyeconic the only way that ever works: by starting with themselves.
Their personalities. Their standards. Their values. Everything else followed.
Curation Is a Point of View
Eyeconic made a decision most stores are afraid to make:
They weren’t trying to sell to everyone.
They weren’t interested in stocking brands for recognition or volume. They partnered with brands they genuinely admired brands that met their criteria, not the market’s.
This is where Eyeconic becomes educational without being preachy.
They don’t push product, they explain it.
They don’t chase trends, they contextualize them.
They don’t ask for trust, they earn it through conversation.
In a world obsessed with conversion, they chose conviction.
Community Without the Transaction
Their interests don’t stop at eyewear, so neither does the store. They run, so they started a running club. Not as a campaign. Not as a funnel. Not as a clever play to “activate” customers.
Some of the people who show up don’t even wear glasses. That alone tells you everything you need to know.
Eyeconic isn’t built on extracting value, it’s built on sharing it. Everything they do is driven by curiosity, by culture, by the simple desire to connect with people who move through the world with intention.
One Year In, and Exactly Where They Should Be
Reaching one year isn’t the headline. How they reached it is.
By understanding that not everyone has to like you.
By accepting that clarity repels as much as it attracts.
By choosing to be specific instead of safe.
This is the lesson Eyeconic Optiek offers not just to clients, but to the industry itself: Be yourself. Sharpen your point of view. Build something that reflects who you are, not what you think will sell.
The audience will find you. And when they do, it won’t be because you were cheaper.
It’ll be because you stand for something.
