Brands To Know: MESSY WEEKEND
Fashionable eyewear for the active wearer
Messy Weekend is the Copenhagen based eyewear brand you NEED on your radar. For affordable, stylish but ready for any and every event sunglasses, Messy Weekend pride themselves on having something for everyone. Made to wear all year round, this brand brings cool kid energy to every wearer while highlighting Scandinavian minimalism and design. Giving back to the global community is an important part of this brand, donating to clean the oceans with every pair of glasses purchased.
Tell us about the brand! Where did the inspiration for Messy Weekend come from? The idea was to create a brand with high quality products at fair prices that could live within urban sub-cultures such as the street environment, the skate culture, surfing, music and festivals. We felt like there were a huge splash of purely fashion eyewear brands and a huge splash of purely sports eyewear brands, and we wanted to create something that could fit in both categories and link them together and create a fashionable but wearable eyewear brand with a mix of performance and fashion styles. For a long time our working vision has been to become “the Supreme of eyewear”.
What influenced the name of the brand? The reality in the eyewear industry is that there is a huge mismatch between cost prices and sales prices, since there is a huge Italian monopoly dominating the industry and thus charging exorbitant prices. The idea of our brand was to produce similar quality products at a price that is often 50% off to comparable qualities by sourcing raw materials ourselves and by slashing margins - thus, we needed a brand name to capsulate the idea that you could have a pair of quality sunglasses that you would still use for a Messy Weekend - or to cover up after one - like festivals, parties or even sports.
How do you come up with new styles? What’s the design process? We are inspired by the different areas of Copenhagen and other areas of Denmark, and form our collection around inspiration from bespoke locations such as the hip areas of the Meatpacking district with highly fashionable sunglasses, the skate parks in Noerrebro with their rough looks and the utility based outfits of Cold Hawaii surf center in Northern Denmark. We also form our collection around bespoke people that we look up to - our Kurt model is for example inspired by Kurt Cobain and the iconic shades he wore in white.
What do you love most about sunglasses? Sunglasses sit right there in your face, probably the most visible part of your outfit. Thus, you can use the sunglasses to form your outfit around like you do sneakers, and it states an awful lot about the way you express yourselves. Sunglasses are also wearable at all times in the year by mixing frame colours and lens brightness and makes it the perfect companion for all outfits.
What advice would you give to someone looking to launch an accessories brand? Don’t rush. It takes more time than you think at first to build something durable, and there are no quick inroads. Discounts, quick fixes, bad products hurt the brand more in the longer run than the immediate fix that can be derived from it helps. Further, I would also advice anyone to spend a lot of time talking to customers especially in wholesale, as accessories is often times an overlooked category but there are a lot of awareness and revenue to be made if done correctly - but the customers needs to understand it.
If you could have anyone wear a pair of Messy Weekend glasses who would it be? That would be The Weeknd - time he gets a bit Messy.