LONDON — Torunn Gullaksen has always had a hard time letting go of the thick, colored sheets of acetate that Ace & Tate uses for its frames, and finally found a solution.
Normally, those leftover sheets are sold to third parties and transformed into objects like buttons, or they’re recycled and turned into a generic black color.
Although the process may be good for the planet, it’s no fun for Gullaksen, who cannot bear the thought of saying goodbye to the bespoke colored sheets she develops herself as head of design and product development.
“I had been thinking for a while about how to repurpose our acetate. Eighty percent of it goes to waste” in the process of making the frames, said Gullaksen in a telephone interview from Asia, where she has been touring the Ace & Tate factories.
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“We design our acetate from the ground up, and it’s such a beautiful process,” added Gullaksen, who particularly loves the process of developing the different colors. “When the acetate gets recycled, it’s turned black,” which is a shame, she said.
Her solution was to team with her friends at Felt, an Amsterdam-based retailer that specializes in local, handmade products and sells merchandise ranging from sunglasses and jewelry to bags and furniture.
They came up with the idea of making jewelry. Felt could laser-cut the shapes from the acetate sheets, embellish them, and turn them into pendants that could hang from gold hoops or chains. They made 11 styles in total, three shapes of earrings in a variety of colors, and a necklace.
The earrings are priced at 59.95 euros, while the necklace costs 99.95 euros.
“I wanted the Felt aesthetic, and I trusted them blindly,” said Gullaksen. The result was a fusion of the Ace & Tate colors — vermillion, golden yellow and purple pink — with the organic Felt shapes and designs.
Maaike Minderhout, cofounder of Felt, said the brand’s in-house atelier welcomes collaborations such as these and wants to encourage people “to think differently, to break away from the usual.”
During the trial phase there were a few mishaps, with Felt accidentally burning the pieces with the laser, said Gullaksen. But the Felt team soon got the hang of it, and even posted a video of the mapping and cutting process on their website.
Gullaksen said she’ll continue exploring creative ways to repurpose the acetate. Her approach is very much in the DNA of the brand, which has collaborated with myriad fashion companies, including Ganni, Ahluwalia, Cmmn Swdn, and Depop, where it sold fully refurbished, pre-owned frames.
Ace & Tate sells its own prescription and sunglass frames online and in physical stores, conducts eye tests and fulfils prescriptions for a flat fee.
For its frames Ace & Tate uses bio acetate, recycled acetate, and a new material called Acetate Renew Plus Bio, an innovative material created from local waste plastics that undergo a special recycling process.
Hard-to-recycle plastics are broken down at the molecular level in order to form a component that is later combined with sustainably sourced wood pulp to make the material, which Ace & Tate said has the same quality as traditional acetate.
The company, which has been B Corp certified since 2021, is working on many sustainability fronts. It has recently revamped its shipping process from factories in Cambodia, China, Vietnam, Italy and Hungary. It has also added more in-store lens production to reduce shipping.
Last year the brand marked its 10th birthday by unwrapping a slew of new stores in the U.K., mostly in London, where founder and chief executive officer Mark de Lange said he sees a “huge, huge opportunity.”
The strategy has been to keep stores off of the high streets and locate them on side streets to create a neighborhood shop atmosphere for local residents.
The company has an ambitious overall growth plan for 2024, with the aim of unveiling a store a month. The company operates more than 85 stores across 10 countries, with 110 people in the Netherlands, and roughly 600 employees at the stores.