No Need for Kid Gloves - The Story of Julbo Looping Sunglasses

Aged between 2 and 4, your child is at the age of exploration, experiencing their first tastes of freedom, venturing around outside, the road to independence starts here...even if it is only mere centimetres from you, they are still toddling around and are free from the constraints of the pushchair or pram.

Although free from the safety of their chariot and standing on their own two feet, safety shouldn’t be sacrificed in every area and very importantly not from protection from the sun.

Designed for the infant and toddler who spends a lot of time outside, the Julbo Looping sunglasses are a favourite of ours at OutdoorGB, a completely child-proof model, and so they should be, seen as it was children who had a hand in designing them.

The Looping story is often told at Julbo and is a particular favourite of ours at OutdoorGB. When Yann Lozac'h was tasked with a designing a new pair of sunglasses for children, he already had 5 years of sunglasses designing experience, it wasn’t even the first pair of sunglasses for kids he was involved in designing, but this time he wanted to do it differently.

To get the perfect design for his new sunglasses project, Yann decided to involve the consumer in the design process, employing his two young daughters and delegating his workload to them, he set up his own under 5’s sunglasses research and development unit. “I decided to make my young daughters work and do my job! So I gave them several traditional sunglasses to try for the weekend and watched carefully every single reaction, how they used the product by themselves without parents help.”

Yann’s first observation from the work his daughters, Liloo, 1 and Zoe, 3 had put in, was that there was a strange statistic where if kids are putting on sunglasses themselves, 90% of the time they will put them on the wrong way (upside down). “I decided to try to make a symmetric pair of glasses; every side is the right one.”

The second thing Yann noticed was that babies like to eat everything, even sunglasses and especially when they are teething! Paint is most definitely not a recommended baby food and even when care is taken and safe chemical products are used, it is still not ideal for it to be entering a child’s mouth. “I looked for a similar plastic product that we use inside the mouth that wouldn’t cause any trouble and I found the idea of a of Tooth brush. Then I thought, Yeah, I got it! My sunglasses must be designed like a tooth brush!”

Yann’s final observation occurred when Liloo hurt her finger on the sunglass hinge when trying to put the glasses on. Not wanting to see his daughter hurt and especially by a product he had designed, Yann decided his new sunglasses design should feature a one piece frame without hinges and with flexible areas, something that wouldn’t be a problem because of how small the product was going to be.

After a weekend of work from his children, Yann Lozac'h had a precise idea of what the sunglasses were going to be like and only had to make a few sketches to convince his boss this was the product to make.
Following another week of work from his daughter Liloo, where she was trying a handmade prototype every two hours to ensure geometry and temple angles were ok, the Julbo Looping was born.

4 years later, the Looping is one of the biggest commercial successes Julbo has had, child friendly sunglasses featuring a symmetrical shape. Completely toddler-proof, the Looping takes no notice when a child pulls them wide apart to put them on – they just bounce back. And with the symmetrical shape, the Looping promotes independence; your child can put them on themselves with no worries about them putting them on the wrong way round.

See the latest incarnation of the Looping, the Julbo Looping III Children's Sunglasses, here.