The Actual Difference Between $30 and $489 Sunglasses

A $200 pair of sunglasses can cost about $40 to make — and the company that controls Ray-Ban, Oakley, and Prada's eyewear would prefer you didn't know that. *Want to know how tons of products actually get priced? Click here:* https://clickhubspot.com/x0s7 We bought six pairs of sunglasses — from a $14 generic pair to $489 Pradas — and analyzed the UV protection, optical clarity, scratch resistance, impact durability, and frame construction. Then we talked to E. Dean Butler, the founder of LensCrafters, who helped us decode what actually drives the price gap. The answer to "what am I actually paying for?" is messier than you'd think. On one end, one company owns so much of the eyewear pipeline — the brands, the stores, the vision insurance — that when Oakley wouldn't play ball on pricing, they pulled them from shelves, watched the stock crater, and bought the whole company for $2.1 billion. Meanwhile, a surf-born brand from Hawaii is quietly using spy-satellite technology to make some of the best lenses in the world at half the price of Prada's titanium frames. Get the 5-minute newsletter keeping 2M+ innovators in the loop: https://thehustle.co/join-free-2