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hat do two ardent skiers do when their architect and marketing jobs in the capital are keeping them off the slopes? Build a snow-focused sunglasses business. Then make it successful enough to accommodate two offices, one in Hammersmith, and the other a five-minute walk from a ski lift in Verbier, Switzerland.
That’s what Zoe and Ali Watkiss, husband and wife co-founders who met as students at Manchester University, have done with their sunglasses business SunGod. It aims to “fill a gap in the market between expensive designer sunglasses that came with huge mark-ups, and you’re too scared to use for sports, or cheap £10 knock-offs that break and you have to buy again every year ”.
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Fans now include Kate Middleton – snapped wearing SunGods at a sailing event this summer – and the Lionesses, who sported the shades on their Trafalgar Square victory parade. Other sports stars have sponsorship deals with them, including the McLaren F1 team – Lando Norris and Daniel Ricciardo have their own SunGod designs, as do the England Rugby team.
Behind the apparently-sudden brand ubiquity was a long slog, though. The Watkisses, now both 35, initially began graduate roles in London, Ali as an architect on the Chelsea Barracks project; Zoe marketing Maybelline products for L’Oreal. “Ali was feeling uninspired – it was 2008 and nothing was getting built in London – and I was overworked. We wanted to come up with our own thing,” Zoe Watkiss explains.
The keen skiers first launched a bobble hat side hustle – colorful personalized hats that were sold to uni ski clubs. “It was quite a sight watching Ali crocheting bobble hats in a suit on the tube to work. We had a team making them at the end, but it was too seasonal to scale.”
Sunglasses – “durable, lifetime guarantee-backed custom products, sold direct to consumers” were their next idea. After attending an eyewear conference in Italy, the couple found a Chinese manufacturer willing to use sustainable materials and make personalized pairs (SunGod sunglasses, which cost from £55, allow customers to pick size, design, lens colour, frame color and logo colour, and come with a lifetime guarantee: break, and the duo will fix them).
In 2013, SunGod launched a crowdfund on Indiegogo, which generated £80,000 in pre-orders, to pay for a first production run. “The crowdfund went much better than expected, selling nearly 4,000 pairs, when our target had been to sell 400.” So the duo quit their jobs. “When you secure customers, you secure brand advocates at the same time. These early backers inevitably want you to succeed, and spread the word accordingly.”
For the first two years, it was just the two of them: “A low point was in 2016, when our logistics partner walked out the week before Christmas. Each pair of SunGods is built by hand to order, so we had to rope in all the friends and family we could to sit in a Big Yellow storage container and build orders over Christmas. Definitely not the most festive experience,” Zoe Watkiss recalls.
Further investment came via a Kickstarter campaign in 2016 to launch ski goggles, with £134,000 raised from some 1400 backers, and a £1.5 million Crowdcube raise – from 1004 investors – in 2020. A second Crowdcube fundraise last month raised £3 million.
The brand now has 22 staff – eight in the Verbier shop and office and 14 in Hammersmith. The duo still promise to repair any broken sunglasses for free. “The first claim we received was a pair that someone’s dog had chewed up and destroyed, so that made us question what we’d let ourselves in for…. But it was the right decision; it’s paid dividends from both a marketing and a sustainability standpoint since.”
The brand is now a certified Carbon Neutral brand and a B Corp; Revenue jumped from £5 million in 2021 to £8 million this year. The duo are now focused on expansion into North America and Australia, “it will help us to de-seasonalise the business – it’s sunny there when not here” – as well as launch into prescription glasses. “All of which doesn’t leave much time for skiing – but that’s OK,” Watkiss laughs.
