Where True Luxury Still Begins by Hand

Five eyewear houses preserving the value of craft: Maison Bonnet, Masunaga, Jacques Marie Mage, Hoffmann Natural Eyewear and Twinz.

The word luxury is used too easily in eyewear. A high price, a famous name or an expensive material can create the appearance of luxury. But as a designer and manufacturer, I look for something deeper: Who made the frame? How closely did the maker listen to the material? How much human judgement remains in the finished object? And does the person wearing it become part of its story?

Maison Bonnet, Masunaga, Jacques Marie Mage, Hoffmann Natural Eyewear and Twinz do not share one design language or one production model. Some are century-old family houses. Another created a modern collectors' culture in roughly a decade. Some make everything inside their own manufactories, while others work with highly specialised workshops.

This is not a ranking, and it is not an attempt to measure these houses against one another. I want to explain what I value in each of them and why their stories matter to someone who is genuinely interested in handcrafted eyewear.

Maison Bonnet: the wearer is the hero

Photo: Courtesy Joël Saget/Maison Bonnet

The Bonnet family's story began in France in the 1930s, when Alfred Bonnet immersed himself in the traditions of working with gold and genuine tortoiseshell. His son Robert later established the Paris house as it is known today. The knowledge has now passed through four generations of the family.

Maison Bonnet is distinguished by an idea that sounds simple but demands extraordinary discipline: the frame is created around one person. The face is measured before the design is finalised. Several fittings, adjustments and decisions follow, until the glasses belong naturally to their wearer.

The house remains one of the rare custodians of genuine tortoiseshell craftsmanship, working from legally established old stocks that existed before international trade restrictions. It also works with buffalo horn and acetate. These organic materials are difficult to shape and impossible to standardise completely. Their rarity influences the price of certain commissions, which can reach tens of thousands of euros, but the material alone does not explain the full value.

For me, everything is connected: the history of almost a century, the difficult natural materials, the knowledge passed through a family and the personal care given to every client. Maison Bonnet is not only the heritage of one family. It is also part of the heritage of Paris and France.

The house has created eyewear for Yves Saint Laurent, Aristotle Onassis, Francois Mitterrand and other well-known figures. Audrey Hepburn, one of the defining icons of the golden age of fashion and a great lover of eyewear, helped turn the frame into a style statement in its own right. She became a personal source of inspiration for us as well. In admiration of this woman, Twinz created the Audrey model.

Yet famous names are not the heart of the story. The true heroes of Maison Bonnet are the people for whom the glasses are made.

Masunaga: a manufactory that gave a region a future

Photo: Masunaga

Masunaga's story began in Fukui Prefecture, Japan, in 1905. At the time, the region needed work that could support local people through difficult winter seasons. Gozaemon Masunaga brought experienced spectacle makers from Osaka and Tokyo to Fukui, where local craftspeople learned through a cooperative system similar to a guild.

The ambition was greater than creating a brand. Eyewear production became a profession, an industry and a source of stability for the region. Over the following 120 years, Masunaga helped turn Fukui into one of the world's most respected centres of eyewear manufacturing, while remaining connected to the founding family. It is not simply a brand, but a true dynasty.

The company's philosophy is uncompromising. Masunaga wants to earn a profit, as every company must, but never by accepting a lower standard. Quality comes first, even when achieving it means remaking a product or accepting a short-term loss. There is something almost samurai-like in that discipline.

Masunaga creates eyewear by hand from titanium, Japanese acetate and other refined materials. Its perfectionism is not expressed loudly. It is visible in the balance, finishing and consistency of the frames.

An eyewear connoisseur should know the story of Masunaga because it proves that a manufactory can create more than products. It can build skills, confidence and prosperity around the place where it was born.

That idea is very close to us at Twinz. Gyumri has a deep culture of craftsmanship and enormous potential to create luxury at an international level. Our goal is not only to make eyewear there, but also to contribute to the wellbeing of our region through skilled work, knowledge and long-term opportunity.

Jacques Marie Mage: how a strong brand can be built in a decade

Photo: Jacques Marie Mage

Compared with century-old houses, Jacques Marie Mage is young. Founded in Los Angeles by French designer Jerome Mage, the brand develops its designs in California and entrusts production to specialist workshops in Japan and Italy.

In roughly a decade, JMM understood an important change in the luxury market. As many established names expanded production, the difference between true luxury eyewear and an ordinary branded product became less clear. JMM moved in the opposite direction: bold forms, recognisable hardware, expensive materials, careful hand-finishing and deliberately limited editions.

The result was not simply a successful collection, but a culture of collectors. Numbered series, controlled availability and strong cultural storytelling created desire around every new release. Los Angeles gave the brand a natural audience among actors, musicians, designers and people for whom eyewear was already part of identity.

Jacques Marie Mage may describe itself through the language of quiet luxury, but its glasses are not quiet. They are bold, immediately recognisable and designed to make their presence felt. That is not a criticism. It is one of the clearest reasons for the brand's success.

JMM's scarcity is also different from the rarity created by an organic material. The brand chooses how many examples of a design will exist. It is an intelligent strategy of deliberately created scarcity: what is difficult to obtain is often desired more and valued more highly. The brand limits quantity; nature limits the possibility of repetition.

For me, Jacques Marie Mage is also proof that a strong brand does not need a century of history. In roughly a decade, it is possible to build a recognisable language, a strong system and a place in the global industry. That requires clear vision, courage and consistency in every decision.

Hoffmann Natural Eyewear: true understatement

Photo: Hoffmann Natural Eyewear

Hoffmann Natural Eyewear was founded in Germany in 1978 and is best known for working with genuine buffalo horn and other natural materials. In its manufactory in the Volcanic Eifel region, a single frame passes through around 280 individual operations.

What distinguishes Hoffmann is not only the material, but also the restraint with which the brand presents itself. There is deliberately no prominent logo on the outside of the frames. Hoffmann believes the wearer's personality should remain more important than visible branding. The glasses and their quality are allowed to speak for themselves.

For me, this is true quiet luxury. What remains unsaid can be far more interesting. Let the glasses and their quality tell the story.

Horn behaves like wood in one essential way: its colours and grain never repeat exactly. Even within the same model, there can be no identical second pair. This is not scarcity invented by a campaign. It is natural rarity.

Hoffmann offers a broad range of forms and continually develops its production, combining accumulated experience with new materials and technologies. Nature remains the starting point: horn, wood, slate and other materials are not hidden beneath a uniform surface. Their differences become part of the design.

The depth of the manufacturing group behind Hoffmann is also visible through its relationship with Maybach Eyewear. Hoffmann and Maybach are connected through the manufacturing expertise of IVKO, which supports the development and production of Maybach luxury frames. For me, the ability to preserve in-house production at this level is one of Hoffmann's greatest strengths.

Twinz: what we want to preserve

We founded Twinz to preserve our connection with wood, our roots and the history of our family. But heritage, for us, is not only the past. It is something we create today and hope to pass forward.

Our first experiments began in 2014, and in 2016 two brothers founded Twinz in Gyumri. We continue to work and create every day so that, a hundred years from now, something of what we once began will still remain.

Like Maison Bonnet, we believe in the idea of a heritage that can outlive its founders. Like Masunaga, quality and the pursuit of perfection are our greatest passion. We constantly experiment with materials and technologies, looking for new possibilities and working to improve the quality of every detail.

Like Jacques Marie Mage, Twinz has existed for around ten years. We do not yet have its worldwide recognition, but we have our own manufactory, where every day we create, test and refine our frames.

A Twinz wooden frame is built from eight cross-grained layers of veneer, reinforced with fibreglass and, in selected constructions, carbon fibre. It passes through more than 60 individual operations, combining precision technology with decisions made by human hands.

CNC helps us achieve accuracy, but it cannot decide how the grain of a particular piece of wood should live within a shape, feel a transition in the surface or determine the moment when the correct balance has been reached. Those decisions still belong to people.

Natural materials make every frame unrepeatable. As with Hoffmann, the grain and colour of the material cannot be recreated a second time. The texture of wood is like a fingerprint: it never repeats. Even two frames of the same model can never be completely identical. Some of our models are made in limited series, while others are never repeated at all.

For Twinz, limitation is therefore not only a marketing decision. It begins in nature and continues through the reality of hand production.

Our manufactory is inseparable from Gyumri. The city holds generations of knowledge in woodwork, jewellery, metal and precise handcraft. We believe these skills can create contemporary luxury for the world. Just as eyewear production helped develop a culture of craftsmanship in Fukui, Twinz has a long-term goal to create skilled work, confidence and greater wellbeing in our own region.

We are not trying to repeat the path of these houses. Twinz has its own understanding of what we create, its own character and its own road. But their experience reminds us that a true manufactory begins with respect: for the material, the craft, the person and time.

We are only at the beginning of this journey. But we want Twinz to become, one day, not only the heritage of our family, but also part of the history of Gyumri and Armenia.

"My personal understanding of luxury cannot be borrowed from another brand. My understanding of luxury is what I create myself."

With respect,
Babken Khachatryan
CEO, Co-Founder & Designer
Twinz Eyewear