Founded in 1986 by serial entrepreneur and marketing guru, Joe Sugarman, after a chance car ride with a friend who happened to be a NASA executive. After picking Sugarman up from the airport, his friend noticed that he was squinting, and handed him a pair of sunglasses to try. Sugarman couldn't believe what he was seeing and had to know everything about them. The technology initially came from Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who in the 1980s were studying the harmful properties of light in space. To combat this, they developed a lens capable of absorbing, filtering and scattering the dangerous light. The lens employed a light-filtering/vision-enhancing system based on unique methods they discovered by studying birds of prey.

Joe Sugarman was a marketing visionary whose pioneering tactics helped define modern direct-to-consumer strategy. He was the first to popularize 1-800 infomercial-style ads, long before DTC was a category—and even placed BluBlockers in SkyMall magazine, making them a staple of in-flight impulse buys. He took to the streets with man-on-the-street interviews, capturing real-time reactions from strangers trying the sunglasses—an approach that now feels remarkably ahead of its time in the era of TikTok and street-interview-style content. Sugarman didn't just market a product—he created a movement around it.