For New Year's 2011, Designers Grapple with Novelty Glasses Challenge

(Wall Street Journal) - The coming celebration of 2011 has presented a design challenge for the now globalized and hyper-competitive novelty eyewear industry that churns out glasses shaped as the coming year, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Going back to New Year’s Eve 1991, when two musicians from Seattle first sold the novelty glasses in Times Square, there has always been two loops or zeroes in some kind of balance. The numbers in the date have very nearly dictated the configuration of the plastic frames worn by revelers.

But the upcoming 2011 festivities, with those slender and inhospitable 1s, has set off an even more robust scramble for workable novelty solutions -- with some not-so-attractive results.

The 2011 frames in inventory at distributor Shea’s Shades of Fun were plucked from a field of about 20 different manufacturers, all based in China. General Manager Pat Shea reviewed an array of options drafted by the manufacturers before she eventually settled on a design that places one lens inside the zero (naturally) and the second between the two 1s.

A walk through midtown Manhattan more than a week before New Year’s Eve reveals a competitive novelty marketplace already bustling with multiple 2011 options. The most popular option seems to be eschewing a creative way to squeeze in a lens for a simple design that incorporates at least one of the numbers in an unforced manner.

For her part, Shea looks at the awkwardness of 2011 novelty glasses as more of a blessing than a curse. After 20 years of rather obvious design solutions, she is looking forward to a new generation of partygoers who will embrace less conservative eyewear.

“The kids who are coming up now,” she explains, “aren’t going to remember the time when the ’00’s were next to each other.”

Read more at WSJ.com