Making Fashionable Eyewear That Suits Your Needs With Alex Feldman of Alexander Daas

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You want tech and tacos? Tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper captains counting beans Contador quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco stand in puesto lucha libre and sombrero got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean watch the sunset la Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the moon SD Tecos with your host, Neil Bloom.

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Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, and I'm thrilled to have you here. On the Tacos and Tech podcast. We interview builders of technologies, of companies, of communities, and we do it weekly. So thanks for tuning in. Every Tuesday, a new interview and on Fridays we talk about what's new in the San Diego tech ecosystem from a news perspective. So make sure you join us there as well too. We also have a tech newsletter that comes out every other week@freshbroodtech.com you can subscribe to listen to it without further ado. Enjoy this episode and welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I am your host, Neil Bloom. I am thrilled to have Alex Feldman on CEO of Alexander Das. Hey, Alex, thanks for joining us on the podcast.

How's it going, Neil? Thank you for having me.

Yeah, no, this is great. You know, San Diego has become a hotbed for some of the kind of apparel and also kind of this where apparel meets tech and other pieces of kind of tech meets consumer, which I think is really interesting and I'm excited to have that kind of conversation with you around what you've been building here. So you want to quickly give us a one minute over of what Alexander Doss is.

Yeah, Alexander Das is an eyewear brand and we have optical stores in San Diego and Del Mar, Los Angeles and San Francisco. And ultimately, we're fashion, but we're medical and we're tech with the technical aspects when it comes to prescription lenses and whatnot. And the focus is styling people into eyewear that makes them look and feel great. But then, you know, you have to jump into the lenses and to get all, you know, use the latest technology with that.

And.

Yeah, so that's essentially the basics.

Very cool. No, I think the fashion piece is interesting. I think San Diego and something maybe more Orange County. San Diego is a bit more of a B2B kind of tech kind of town. So having a fashion edge is unique. So take us to your backstory. Like, were you always born and raised to build this fashion meets tech kind of eyewear line?

You know, in a way, yes. In a way, no. So basically, I'm a second generation optician, and my parents, they had an optical store in San Francisco. It was just some, you know, mom and pop shop. But they definitely tried to push me away from being involved in the business. But I did grow up around it, helping a lot. And so I was, as a child always involved, went to college, and I just genuinely always loved eyewear. And just we work with such incredible brands that are, you know, speaking of tech, just like really technologically advanced with the materials and the way that the lenses mount and this and that. So it's just always been really fascinating. Interesting. Between that, then you have like the fashion component and celebrity. So just it's a product that is amazing to work with. And I saw a bigger picture from their perspective. They wanted me to become a doctor or a lawyer, you know, something along those lines. They were immigrants and my father was an engineer. And so this was kind of like the field he fell into to just, you know, support the family and get by. So that's kind of like where he saw it at and I saw something bigger. And so after college, I got involved and I've been working on growing the company to take it further. So, you know, I was born for it, but they tried to push me away for it, from it.

That makes sense. Interesting. The entrepreneurship piece, though, you know, also not necessarily typical for say, an engineer or others to have that, but the immigrant experience usually kind of comes with that act like an owner and head on a swivel in a new land or a new industry or something like that. Is that something you kind of picked up within the entrepreneurship side, within the family too?

Yeah, I think so. You know, it's funny, all my siblings pretty much, and, you know, they're all entrepreneurial and I think we get that from my dad. He definitely was always creative in finding a way to make a living. And so he had just other stuff before he even got into optics. And so that's kind of ultimately what I love. I love being an entrepreneur and with creating Alexander Doss, I'm just, you know, you could be an entrepreneur and work with so many different products or services or whatever. Like I just. This is a product I love and it's a business I love. And the entrepreneurial spirit, it's what ultimately drives me. Like even, you know, my dad planted the seed with the shop and part of my drive is because I want to be able to show him that what he did, it's not nothing. Cuz I was able to, you know, to see that I was able to take further and turn it into something like, yeah, huge.

That's awesome. Take us through what the industry's gone through since you started as well and kind of took it over from this because I've got to imagine new technologies come in. But also fashion has changed a lot over the course of building this.

Yeah. So the business used to be very medical. Back in the day, everybody looked at eyewear as just like this medical device. And over the years it's become much more fashionable to the point to where now so many optical stores or, you know, retailers, they're just retailers that don't really have that old school optical knowledge and that they don't get really that involved with the technology behind the lenses to understand because, you know, there's so much technology with the lenses and with different prescriptions and different uses of, you know, what people do with their lives. There is the right pairing of the right lens for each person and a lot of it now is just very kind of like retail. And so part of my mission was I grew up in the old school optics world, but I'm really into the whole modern thing and so I'm kind of combining it and keeping, you know, staying modern, staying fashionable, but pairing some of that old school optics knowledge and technology into the experience for the customers.

Interesting. I mean, but you've also packaged a lot under one roof from also having your own eyewear line. I think that also is where you separate yourself. It seems like an optician, the medical piece and sometimes they'll have their own like little mini showroom inside their office. Definitely not a storefront whatsoever. Yeah, well, I mean, maybe there's a few of those, you know, like, or B. Parker's, but they don't do the eyewear part right. So what is the. Having three under one roof, I mean, it gives you a lot of control.

Where.

How long have you been doing that and what was the development? Maybe some pivots to get to that point of all under one roof.

Well, you know, it started with the San Francisco store. So I took over 2006 or something after managing for a while for my dad. And from there I launched Alexander Doss in 2010, the brand product and we started doing distribution and as we were growing that we were able to, you know, we had some, several celebrities wearing the frames and we're able to get some good name recognition within our like independent small eyewear world, not the huge designer brands. I expanded south and started opening up stores on south. And so that happened around 2013 when I first started opening stores in San Diego and a couple in la and it was just kind of like step by step. Definitely a lot of. When you're doing a lot, it's balance, trying to juggle production with the factories, training with the. Because you know, I have a very specific way that we have to do things and all my petitions need to be like up with the knowledge. We don't just hire like retail people, they need to be very technical, need to know how to like work with the frames and understand the lenses and it's a lot of training behind that and just like the development of the location. So it's, it's a juggle but you know, just step by step. So it's exciting though, but it's definitely a fun challenge.

Yeah, for sure. Is that what eventually brought you to San Diego? Cause it sounds like you're Bay Area based. How'd you land a new home here in town?

Well, my wife is originally from here, so she grew up in Carmel Valley. And after we got married, we relocated to San Diego and then we bounced out LA for a while, but then we came back in 2020 because Covid, we have kids and with all the shutdowns and this and that, we just realized with all the family support and just like the community is great here. You know, you have the beach, you have the mountains, you have hiking, you got everything here. And it's just a incredible. At this point I'm trying to recruit everybody to move to San Diego. Like all my family that's still like in the Bay Area or LA or whatever. Like you need to move to San Diego. It's the best place. Yeah.

So yeah, not a hard sell, at least on the coasts, that's for sure. What are we seeing with COVID I gotta Imagine like people put off, you know, their eye health and even checking in on their eyewear itself too. Is it back and forth or like, what's it been like with people pushing that and making that a lower priority until now?

Yeah, it definitely. There was a huge pickup as things open back up. And especially, you know, people are used to doing their like once a year eye exam and they get new glasses. So all these people that held off for over a year because of COVID now they all like came running at the same time and it got. The optical industry has been pretty busy because of it. But I do want to just throw in that it's really important to get your regular eye exams. Some people try to skip that all the time and they'll come in with expired prescriptions and they, they like, oh, just, just fill my old prescription. But you know, when you do the eye exam, checking for so much more than just a prescription and there's so much that the doctors can see in the eye that can be signs to other way, more important health. So it's really important preventative health in general, not just eyes.

Absolutely. Especially during COVID where we probably like really did some extra damage to our eyes, like staring at our screens even more so just being home. Right?

Yeah. So. And there's been a lot of advancements with tech with the lenses because of COVID So it did inspire a lot. For example, we work with one of our main lens brands that we work with, Shamir, and they have the progressive lenses. And for those not familiar with progressive lenses, that's like we have the distance on top and you have the reading prescription at the bottom, and in between you kind of have everything. So it's not the old school like line bifocal, but this is. You can't tell there's no line, but it just, it gradually changes from distance to reading. So the traditional progressive lens has always been shaped kind of. You lose some periphery when you get into that intermediate reading. And it's kind of like an hourglass shape. The zones that you can see that you can use. And they launched a new lens, the Shamir Autograph Intelligence, where they have just because like through Covid, so many people are now using, you know, they're on their laptops all day long, way more than ever before. And they basically have figured out a way to change the lens design so that the intermediate is actually the wider portion. And now you have more periphery in the intermediate and the reading becomes the smallest portion. And this is kind of like, you know, in our little nerdy Optical World. This is kind of like a big deal. And just some of my customers have been blown away by this change because it helps, like, you know, when you're out doing work stuff, it helps a lot to have that periphery. And then another thing, the AR coatings. They launched a new AR coating that has, like, 70% less reflection. And the whole push of them working on this was because everybody is now doing all these zoom calls. And we're losing such an important piece in communication with these zoom calls with the eye contact, especially when people are wearing glasses, because even when you have AR coding, there's still some reflection. You just kind of lose that eye contact. And so they have developed a new coding that had 70% less reflection. And so now even in the zoom calls, you can have better eye contact. And it's a game changer. These are things that were. That are very important in our social lives that now we have to figure out how to do through the computers. And then blue block lenses, obviously, has become a really big thing because of all the blue light that we're getting from the laptops and the phones.

Yeah, absolutely. Wow. Super cool. It's really interesting to see kind of the downstream effects of what Covid has done from all these different industries in that regard, changing the way we work. Work, you know, and now kind of changing the way we. What we wear over our eyes as well during these calls. Super interesting. I just made an appointment for an eye doctor in the next few weeks, so just before this call. So it was a good reminder in that regard, too, having the brick and mortar, though, you know, like, you get a chance to talk to the customer in a different way. And just recently kind of opened in. You're in downtown Del Mar, correct?

Yeah, yeah, We're. We're in the Village Del Mar, right by the beach.

Awesome. Yeah, right there. Yeah. I mean, which is all of a sudden kind of come back to life, which is awesome. Especially now with the fair and the horse race season back, people are hanging out there, like, are you in the shop all the time and kind of talking to people and getting feedback like that?

Yeah. I actually set up a little office for myself in the back to try to keep myself in the store more. I don't go to the stores too often, but I do private appointments, and I like, now because of this location, I get to interact with customers a little more. And I do go out there and I work with my team and, you know, but. And that's the thing that when I first launched Alexander Doss, that was ultimately what drove the concept of the brand. Because I. I'm not a designer by background for. You know, it's funny, I was. I was listening to your. Your last podcast with the Pickleball clothing line, and I was like, oh, my God. Like, I totally felt like I connected so much with a lot of things between, like, the parents to like, just even this concept. Like, I don't have a formal design background. I am an optician. And I built this line from a really just like, technical perspective to just create, like, the right fits and just really make it technically right. But, you know, fashion forward at the same time. And the big inspiration for the designs ultimately came from my customer experiences working with my clients, because I saw what was missing in the market and what niches needed to be filled. And like, you know, at the time when I first launched, the one thing that was a major big deal was there's like, there's a lot of people that have petite, narrow, fit faces, and small PDS people are distance. And at the time, large eyewear was trending big time, and any brands that were even touching small, petite frames, they were doing large frames. And so a huge population of clients were coming in and like, basically they were stuck buying kids frame or barely, you know, kind of like settling on something that was okay and fit okay, but it was really too big. And so I launched a collection focused on petite sizes, and it just blew up, especially on the wholesale side, because going to my reps were going to accounts and, you know, stores were like, oh, my God, I need this. I don't have anything for these clients. And so ultimately, you know, the point is, again, that my experiences working with clients is what inspires the designs that ultimately we put out and where we get the ideas. Like, we have an iron word chain to hang the frame on, and that was driven. There were some other products similar doing that kind of concept at the time, but there was a few issues with what I saw with their design in terms of, you know, like my chain, the pendant that holds the frame, you can actually remove it off the chain. So if you have your own jewelry, like, to wear, you can actually put it onto your own jewelry so you're not stuck, like, having to make a choice either way. My eyewear chain to protect my glasses or I'm wearing my jewelry. And again, this is all just stuff I saw from client experience.

Super interesting. And I think what's interesting most is, you know, a lot would put that into the customer service part, right? And make sure that you really give them a good experience. But to take it another step and say, you know what, we should build our own product line to treat that like, you know, it's another risk when you're already running a certain kind of business. In that regard, I get it. Entrepreneurs take risks, but you also manage risks as well too. What has it been like, like running the fashion part? Have you met a lot of other eyewear line entrepreneurs to kind of help give you guidance and feedback or how'd you know kind of how to build it in that regard?

Yeah. So originally through the San Francisco store, we've always worked with many independent brands. We've always been super kind of like fashion forward to work with special unique boutique lines. And you know, I already had very strong relationships with a lot of those owners through working together for so long. And so some of them, they were able to help me. I got leads on, you know, factories through connections, tips on how to deal with shipping to Canada with Canadian accounts, all these various things. So I've always had resources and just very kind people who were willing to help me essentially kind of go out there and compete with them little bit, I guess you could say. And yeah, got it.

Yeah. And there's a few local like eyewear lines. More sunglass side. So you got like blenders with Chase and Spy comes to mind. More on the sports side, is there a little bit of a brain trust here locally at all where you kind of, I know you're an eo, but is there other eyewear entrepreneurs locally where you can chop it up and share notes on things or is it pretty small world?

It's. Well, I mean, it's a big world and a small world. I'm like in a different smaller sector within our small world of eyewear because I'm in the independent, high end kind of like boutique market. And so we have our a bunch of brands but that work together. But you know, there is, I mean like even Shamir, which is a huge lens company with incredible technology. Their main US office is here in San Diego as well. So even on the lens side they're here. But a lot of brands, there are a lot of, you know, beach, surf inspired eyewear brands came out of San Diego area. So there is a lot of that.

That's cool. I love to see the brain trust because, you know, when you got some domain expertise, you never know what collaboration can do and helping next entrepreneurs jump off as well too. Take us through where you think the industry is kind of headed and especially for your brand, like what's next where do you think you are in a year from now?

You know, our goal is, I mean, we want to open up a few more locations. My eyes set in a couple more locations in the San Diego area. But you know, even beyond though, I'm looking at Orange county. And eventually we want to go nationwide with our retail locations and then with the brand, you know, just to keep growing the collection for next spring summer release, hoping to partner up with a really cool lens company that does these really great, very unique polarized lenses. They have a technology that is different than the traditional polarized lens with a lot of mirror options and to basically partner up with them to release a sun, Big sun collection within our collection featuring these performance lenses. It'll still be. It'll be a high end fashion line, but with these performance lenses. So that's something we're working on right now.

That's awesome. Very cool. I think people want to be able to wear, you know, the same line for both eyewear and sunglasses. I know for me wearing persols for quite a while for both prescription, you know, eyewear and sunglasses. And it's time to make a change to another brand. So that's cool to hear you doing both in that regard.

And it's not just brand, you know, because you say like to change another brand, you know, a lot of times between the brands it's like we just do a lot of different products from the technology standpoint. There's lines like Makita that have a surgical stainless steel flat material that's super light. Or like Lindbergh does a similar thing too, which we carry at the Del Mar store, you know. And so like to go into like this ultra kind of high tech material that's really light. Then you get into the brands like Oconee or Blake Kuwahara that do really thick acetates. And you know, it's like we're all doing kind of something different. And so it's not like shifting from one, from a brand, one brand to another where you're like, you know, kind of like shifting from like an Audi to a BMW. You're going from like a regular car into like an suv, I guess you could say, like, you know, between these brands. And so it's interesting. There's a lot of unique components to it. Yeah.

From functionality and just like other needs of what you need out of your glasses and eyewear as well too, is that. And so that's kind of industry wide. You think that's like an industry wide shift where more materials off different materials are coming into the frames and lenses in that regard that is making people able to differentiate themselves more.

Yeah. And especially in the independent boutique brands because, you know, our whole thing is to be different. When you get into some of the more well known brands, there are a lot of times they're manufactured in the same place and it's just kind of like a different name stamped and it'll be more similar. But the, you know, the only way to grow in the independent sector is to be different, to have a differentiator to stand out. And that's why we're able to work together and help each other too. Because you know, again, like we're quote unquote competitors, but we're actually colleagues and we want to be in the same stores together. To be side by side on the shelf of independent boutiques that have really good opticians who understand the frames, understand the lenses.

Super interesting. I think when you mentioned about expanding Orange County. I know of Orange county just from their tech scene. Like it's one of the densest areas of optometry tech I've seen. Especially for eye health. There's two or three different venture capital funds where they only invest in eye related tech, biotech kind of related companies. So that'd be kind of interesting to see what kind of bubbles up from having a presence in Orange county as well too. Well, you obviously moved, made the move to San Diego and we all know you're recruiting other people here because of the taco scene, Right? That's obviously the whole thing. Do you have a favorite taco spot to date?

Yeah, so my favorite is it's Taqueria California burrito. It's over by the hospital over there. And what is it?

It's north. Like Encinitas.

No, no, no, this is. No, this is down like you know, down more inland. San Diego.

Yeah, 805 there.

So we discovered it when our second son was born. He ended up being the NICU for a little bit. So we were at the hospital a lot and then we just kind of like found this place. And it is in my opinion like one of the most legit taquerias I've come across in San Diego. Just like authentic. Like it's really good. And so we're. I mean I was eating probably too much of that while we're going through that time, but that's my favorite spot.

The best barely have a name, let alone a location. Like a, you know, a spot in the parking lot, you know that, that spot, the truck that pops up every few weeks in the parking lot. So I hear that, though, near your new spot in Del Mar in Fuego is a good, like, social spot to bring people out to. So I know I have. I don't know if I've actually had the tacos there. I think I've just had drinks and a lot of salsa and chips.

Yeah, Fuego is fun. That's where. That's where my wife grew up going. So, like, when we first started dating, I'd come visit San Diego. We were like, that was always at Fuego. It's been a scene for a long.

Time and now you're down the street from it, so you can be there whenever you want.

Yeah, right down the street. And actually the tamarindo across the street is also really good. They got some good stuff. Tacos to like. They're fish tacos.

Solid. Well, it sounds like I need to come by the store and we need to go grab some Mexican food soon, so.

Yeah.

Alex, thanks for being on the pod. Appreciate it. And cheers.

All right. Thank you. Have a good one, too.

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