King Children Are Disrupting the Eyewear Game With 3D Printing
In today’s digital marketplace consumers demand quality, choice, and personal attention. But many retailers are only able to provide this in limited doses, offering algorithm-driven shopping recommendations and little else. King Children is different. This eyewear upstart, founded by college friends Dave Lee and Sahir Zaveri, combines the iPhoneX’s scanning capabilities with 3D printing to create glasses and sunglasses that are customizable down to the smallest detail, allowing consumers to tweak their frames to fit their own unique faces right up to the centimeter. To understand how Lee and Zaveri met, got started, and what they have planned for the future of King Children, we hosted them at our SoHo shop last week to chat and shoot some photos. 
How did you guys meet and come up with the idea to launch your eyewear brand King Children?
Sahir: Dave and I met first semester junior year at Brown. Dave was my neighbor across the hall in the international house and we met on the first day back to school and have been friends ever since. We spent the summer of 2013 doing research on applications of 3D printing technology together along with a couple other friends. At the end of that summer I was convinced there was a massive opportunity to create customized products and that eyewear was the right place to start.
Were either of you interested in eyewear before launching the brand?
Sahir: Dave has a pretty wide face and always had a hard time finding eyewear that would fit him and I had lots of diverse friends who would complain about what a pain it was to buy glasses because they never looked right. After our research in 2013, I was super interested in the eyewear space and tracked what was going on, curious to see if anyone had noticed the same problems in the industry that we had. While we saw a few companies try to solve the problem we never found any solution that was actually affordable, scalable, and convenient.
King Children has some amazing proprietary technology behind it that allows people to customize their glasses to a degree offered by no other company. Can you describe that and the unique materials, manufacturing, and construction of your glasses?
Sahir: We realized pretty quickly that for us to offer consumers truly custom eyewear that was really high-quality, but also affordable, we would need to create our own manufacturing technology. The existing way of making eyewear has been unchanged for a century and is part of the problem with eyewear industry. It’s extremely wasteful and is a very inflexible process. We designed a patent-pending system for making our frames and use a special engineering-grade plastic that is very light but strong and flexible. In total we had to completely redesign our product over 200 times and spend almost two years in research and development to bring the current version of our product to market.
King Children also seems to be committed to fostering and supporting a creative community around it. Can you describe that and explain how you incorporate it into your business?
Sahir: King Children is a brand that’s built around the foundational values of diversity, inclusivity, creativity, and self-expression. These values are not owned by King Children but rather the community that King Children supports, the creatives, musicians, painters, dancers, and DJs that are part of our community live these values every day of their lives. King Children is ultimately a brand that exists to serve this community. We in effect incorporate our community into our business by serving as a platform for them to be seen and heard and also by doing collaborations with them to support what they care about. For example we are currently working with one of our community members, Bianca Muniz, who is a singer-songwriter on a limited edition design that she created with us to support breast cancer awareness—something she cares deeply about being a breast cancer survivor herself.
What are each of your favorite models King Children offers?
Sahir: The Bowtie. It’s the design I wear everyday and is so unique because it would be impossible to make using traditional manufacturing.
Dave: The Cheshire.
What are your next steps for the brand?
Sahir: We want to continue building our community and are always open to doing special editions and design collaborations with people who share our values and love our products.
If you enjoyed this story, check out our Urban Transplants issue here.
