Technology

Posted on October 18, 2017 by staff

‘Sleep-enhancing’ eyewear firm hits crowdfunding target

Technology

A stylish eyewear brand looking to fight the problem of over-exposure to blue light hit its crowdfunding target in just 22 hours.

Barner was looking for €18,000 on Kickstarter and 202 backers have already pledged €19,833 to the project, at the time of writing, with 33 days to go.

The firm was the brainchild of Spaniard Eduardo Gaya, who began suffering from eye strain, eye pain and headaches while working long hours in front of a computer screen at Google’s Dublin base.

Business development manager Christopher Birk, who co-founded the business with Gaya and Ramon Perez, told BusinessCloud recently that it is prototyping fashionable eyewear featuring anti-blue light technology, with a view to selling into both the prescription and non-prescription markets.

“We learned a lot about Kickstarter. Many of the successful projects work with agencies in the United States,” Birk told BusinessCloud before the campaign began.

“We’re going to work with a company that places Facebook ads and which holds data on people who have backed Kickstarter projects before, targeting them specifically.

“If we simply targeted people who wear glasses, there would be a barrier: they’d click on the project and then find they’d need to pledge money and not receive the product immediately.

“We’re also contacting Instagrammers and other people to gain a community around the project.”

Speaking about the need for Barner’s products, he said: “We sit in front of computers for six hours at least every day before reading our WhatsApp, social media and the news on the subway. Later we do the same thing at home – and then we start reading.

“This overexposure is creating problems which we are just finding out about now. The study results so far have been short-term and researchers suspect that there are bigger effects in the long-term.

“People are not offered blue light-reflecting eyewear when they do not have prescription lenses. If people don’t use prescription lenses then it seems like it is forbidden to have this technology.”