As of 2017, Oakley Inc. has been leading change and innovation in the industry of sports gear for more than forty years. Founded in 1975, with an initial investment of only 300$, when visionary inventor Jim Jannard began to question the limits and to change the norms of the whole sports industry in his home garage, Oakley is now a colossus of performance gear, holding more than 600 patents, but always staying true to its creator’s inspiring principle: “everything can and will be made better, the only question is when and by whom”.
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To this day, Oakley proposes itself again and again as the heart and soul of this perpetual strive towards invention and thus progress, devising the impossible and creating a new worldview through the destruction of the paradigms of the mainstream with a simple objective: planning a new and better future.
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From Jannard’s first major technological invention, 'The Oakley Grip', a radically new motorcycle grip, revolutionised through the introduction of a new material, shape and design that was rapidly adopted by the leading athletes of the motocross field, to his famous goggles, endorsed by professional racers such as Marty Smith, Johnny O’Mara, Jeff Ward and Mike Bell, and appreciated for their clearness and wide peripheral vision, to Oakley’s numerous eyeshades, first launched in 1984 and credited with establishing sunglasses as an essential piece of equipment for any sport, all of Oakley products have prompted a drastic transformation for athletes everywhere, reconfirming time after time the high-status and prominence of the brand, decades of artistic evolution, technological improvement and design innovation after its foundation.