Founders of Luxury Eyewear Brand Learn “How Manipulative the Eyewear Industry Is”

“We learned trial by fire, those we could and could not trust.”

When Andrew Kim and Kidong Kwon launched L’Appel, they quickly met challenges of finding people whom they could trust to help them launch their luxury eyewear brand, as Racked Los Angeles writes.

Kim told the fashion outlet how the pair “faced reality very quickly” when they started their company, saying that “it takes so much more than just having a great product to turn it into an actual business. We hustled really hard, but nothing could replace experience. We were pitching to investors, considering design accelerator programs, contacting manufacturers, sourcing materials, and finding marketers. At every step, there were both those who ignored us and those who tried to take advantage of us. We learned trial by fire, those we could and could not trust.”

Adds Kwon: “We became even more impassioned at the thought of how manipulative the eyewear industry is. We’ve never had this kind of motivation; we’ve never worked this hard.”

Read more at Racked Los Angeles