Traders News Source Senior Editor, Mark Roberts Interviews Harrison Gross, CEO & Director Innovative Eyewear, Inc. (NASDAQ: LUCY)
Harrison Gross, CEO & Director Innovative Eyewear, Inc. (NASDAQ: LUCY)
Harrison Gross is one of the founders of Innovative Eyewear and has served as our Chief Executive Officer and as a director since August 2019, where he guides the company’s product and brand development. Prior to his employment at Innovative Eyewear, from August 2017 to August 2019, Mr. Gross served in various positions, including chief executive officer and media & UX lead, of Lucyd Ltd., our largest stockholder and the licensor of our technology which is also a smart eyewear development company where he developed the company’s brand identity and oversaw general operations and product development. Additionally, from November 2015 to August 2021, Mr. Gross served as the Digital Media Manager of Tekcapital PLC (“Tekcapital”) (LON: TEK), a university intellectual property investment firm that is the parent company of Tekcapital Europe Limited, and Lucyd Ltd, the holding company for Tekcapital’s shares in Innovative Eyewear, where he created, developed and marketed for the company’s licensed properties. Prior to that, from October 2013 to September 2014, Mr. Gross worked as a credit analyst for a Verizon, Inc. contractor, where he managed credit systems and provided support to Verizon agents. Mr. Gross is a graduate of Columbia University with a BA in Writing and received a BA in Jewish Studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary. Mr. Gross is well qualified to serve as a director due to his substantial knowledge of our products, being a named inventor of most of the Company’s patents and his experience in marketing, product and app development.
Thank you for giving us your time to answer our questions.
Full Interview
Could you give us a brief overview of your company, its products, and its revenue streams?
Innovative Eyewear develops and sells cutting-edge eyeglasses and sunglasses (“smart eyewear”) operating under the Lucyd® and Lucyd Lyte® brands, which are designed to allow our customers to remain connected to their digital lives while also offering prescription eyewear and sun protection. Lucyd Lyte glasses enable the wearer to listen to music, take and make calls, and use voice assistants to perform many common smartphone tasks hands-free. The Lucyd brand currently offers a leading number of frame styles (16) and lens options (56) in the smart eyewear industry; starting at $149 MSRP ($184 with prescription), Lucyd frames are a value leader, by providing designer glasses and a Bluetooth headset in one.
How has your recent IPO and NASDAQ listing impacted your company?
We were excited to have completed a successful listing despite what’s been less than favorable capital market conditions. We raised gross proceeds of approximately $7.35 million, which is important growth capital that will fuel our future product line expansion, as well as additional sales and marketing initiatives.
What demographic is Lucy’s target market and what do you believe the company’s total addressable market is?
According to Statista, the total addressable market for eyewear in the U.S. is projected to be $28.3 billion in 2021. The market for digital assistants like Siri, Google Voice, Bixby, and Alexa has grown rapidly in North America and had $2.5 billion in revenue in 2020. In the U.S., our primary market, the hearables market, is projected to be $5.1 billion in 2021. We view the popularity of hearables as an important catalyst for the smart eyewear market. The common denominator among markets for the hearables and digital assistants is that they facilitate real-time access to digital data, whether it is through music, calls, navigational directions, or information, among other uses. The combination of hearables and digital assistants provides a transparent, ergonomic interface between the users and their digital lives. At Innovative Eyewear, we are dedicated to a touch-free interface and untethering our customers’ eyes from their smartphone screens through our smart eyewear product.
The synergistic fusion of these three markets enables, in our view, an opportunity to create a completely new experience of connected eyewear, which smoothly delivers the functionality of both optical glasses and headphones, eliminating the need for either on its own. Nevertheless, several orthodoxies of the eyewear industry still hold, namely: if you want to sell a lot of eyewear, we believe it should be attractive, stylish, comfortable (e.g., lightweight, which we believe to be approximately 1oz) and cost roughly the same as traditional eyewear. This is what we have sought to achieve and in our view, have accomplished with the introduction of Lucyd Lyte eyewear.
Can you talk about the recent license agreement with Nautica and how you believe it may impact LUCY revenues?
Nautica is one of the most recognized American brands throughout the world, with over 35 categories available in more than 65 countries with 76 Nautica stores and 291 International stores, and over 1,400 Nautica branded shop in shops worldwide. Our Nautica smart eyewear collection, powered by Lucyd, will align perfectly with today’s lifestyle, as we believe consumers are looking for designer eyewear that allows them to remain connected to their digital lives. We expect the Nautica smart eyewear collection to launch in time for Holiday 2022 or soon thereafter.
The eyewear market has a lot of competitors, some with established brands. What would you say to a consumer to set your brand apart from the rest?
Our Lucyd Lyte eyewear offers several important competitive benefits in the marketplace. Our glasses are lightweight, which makes them comfortable to wear. At 6.5-8 hours of playback per charge, Lucyd Lyte glasses outpace most, if not all, of the competition on battery life. All of our frames can be outfitted in-house or by optical resellers with any combination of prescription, sunglass, readers, and blue light formats. Our frame fronts are made with what we believe are high-quality optical materials to ensure easy lens fitting by any optician. Lucyd Lyte eyewear is water resistant, Bluetooth compatible, and affordably priced, with most models under $150 and prescription lenses that start at $35.
Beyond audio, are there any other eyeglass enhancements planned in the near term or next two years?
As part of our mission to make smart eyewear accessible to the mass market, we are seeking to develop a complete line of Bluetooth eyewear for nearly every size and style preference, with twelve styles already available and forty styles anticipated by the end of 2022.
How long of a cash runway could the funding from your IPO provide for the company?
I don’t believe this is public info yet. To the end of 2023.
What near-term catalyst at LUCY could be the biggest benefit to shareholders?
It is hard to narrow down to one catalyst when we see many potential near-term catalysts. We have spoken with other brands for additional global licensing agreements, as well as additional retailers and big box stores to expand our retail footprint. In addition, we have been developing Vyrb, our full-stack social media application that enables the user to receive and send posts through Lucyd Lyte smart glasses with an individual’s voice. The application launched out of beta in December 2021, and we are aiming to roll out software upgrades to Vyrb in the fourth quarter of 2022, which we anticipate will include new features like monetization, ad-buying modules, an itemized upgrade system, and content-selling capabilities for social media creators. We believe that Vyrb will enhance the utility of current and future Lucyd Lyte glasses by enabling users to be untethered from their smartphones yet still be able to hear and make social media posts.
Thank you,
The Traders News Team
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