Creating Your own Ambiance with Aether Eyewear

Name:
Aether Eyewear
Photography:
Courtesy Aether Eyewear
Words:
Caroline Meeusen

Singapore-based brand Aether combines aesthetic eyewear with audio technology, enabling you to create your own atmosphere and amplify your everyday life and routine. By combining these two senses in such a technologically advanced manner, Aether makes sure a person can focus on the elements he or she chooses, which suits our hectic and ever changing and turning world perfectly. In the words of the brand: “Decide how you look, what you hear and how you listen.” Crossing the border between genres, sound and vision are combined in a high-end and personal look. Hidden speakers direct sound into your ear creating a whole new experience of music and sound.

The fairly young brand came to life in 2019 thanks to a shared vision and passion of three product designers. Their idea for Aether was based on three core pillars: Their aim was to ensure sound beyond dimension within design that redefines limits and all combined in a style that celebrates self-expression. According to the founders, combining audio and eyewear was the next logical step in the evolution of glasses. A lot of people wear (reading) glasses or sunglasses, which creates a big market and they took their chance in leading this next evolution. Co-founder Hannes Unt talks founding Aether, its technology and core values.

VISUAL PLEASURE Magazine:
Can you tell us a bit about your background?

Hannes Unt:
Due to both luck and good timing, I got into the design world from an early age. At the end of the 90s, internet (1.0) was the new cool thing and it naturally caught my interest too. After playing around with some personal experiments and doing a few web design projects I suddenly had multiple job offers on the table, which led me to begin working in a design agency during my first year of high school. These three years of experience with real projects and real clients in the agency, while being amongst a collective of very talented people, only fueled my hunger to continue doing this. After high school was over, I managed to stay in university (graphic design) for just a few months, as all just seemed to move too slowly there. So I took a student loan, quit the university and founded my design studio instead.

Did you always know you’d end up in the creative field?

I guess because I stumbled into design quite early, it was really hard to imagine doing anything else. It became a potent mix of youthful enthusiasm combined with naivety and confidence, so I felt very sure that for me this is the only way forward.

How did Aether come to be? Can you tell me a bit more about what led you to founding your own brand?

Aether came to be from a friendship that developed over the years between me and our other two co-founders, Andy and Raymond.

We already had a long experience working together on different design projects and in 2019 the timing was right for all of us to start building something new. Looking for the next thing, we discovered the potential of audio eyewear as an exciting and emerging new product category. We knew we could do something very different with this and combine our passions for product design, brand building and creative direction.

What was the most challenging about founding this brand?

Our team is spread between multiple locations in Europe and Asia, so when the pandemic hit in early 2020, it inevitably made all of the development work a lot more difficult too – travel was not possible anymore, long delays in sampling processes and supply chain etc. I don’t think we could have been able to bring Aether to market in less than 2 years, from scratch, if we didn’t have so strong past collaboration foundation between our founders and core team. We were already used to working remotely, joining together from different time zones. But all of it just becomes much more complex when you’re dealing with an innovative hardware product.

How would you describe the brand?

Aether is a new realm, defined by harmony beyond genres, where inner mood syncs with outer expression, forging new paths towards a perfect union of vision beyond sight and sound beyond the audible. Our brand is based on three core pillars: sound that transcends dimension, style that amplifies self-expression and design that redefines limits. Each part is equally important in our brand universe and we aim to be known for the unique polyphony between these elements.

Why the combination of audio and eyewear? What is the concept and how do the glasses ‘work’ exactly?

Audio eyewear is the next natural step in the evolution of glasses and also the next big shift happening in wearables. As pretty much everyone wears sunglasses at some point and many people wear optical glasses daily, it’s an unused real estate that’s already there, just waiting for the next step to happen. The temples of our glasses hide speakers, which direct sound straight into your ear, while the sound leakage is controlled and the experience remains private. The feeling that you get from listening music or podcasts through audio eyewear is completely new and very different compared to earbuds or headphones. With earbuds you feel encapsulated, apart, distanced from the world. But with our glasses, the open-ear listening experience feels like another layer of reality has been added to your life: you have your own audio space within, while you can still hear everything else around you too, and there’s nothing in your ears. It feels very liberating, natural and effortless. This experience is also reflected in our brand name Aether — it’s like an addition of a new, mystical dimension. When overlaid onto everyday experiences, ambient soundtracks can lift the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Can you tell us something about the charging case and how it works?

We strongly believe that every element and detail of our brand experience is crucial, so we set off to design the most beautiful charging case we could possibly make. Something that could become iconic and recognizable as Aether on its own. This is why the shape of the case is very clean, minimal and timeless, allowing the intrinsic beauty of the brushed aluminum to stand out. While it protects the glasses it’s also very practical – the case has a battery inside and you can charge your glasses up to 4 times on the go, without needing to plug-in any cables, as our glasses also charge wirelessly in the case.

How does Aether push the boundaries of audio technology and high-end eyewear?

Our mission from inception has been to push beyond what’s expected, to challenge what’s possible and be at the forefront of an emerging audio eyewear industry. We’ve achieved best-in-class capabilities in two distinct industries – eyewear design and sound technology – then pushed the bar higher by harmonizing them in one object of expression. Audio eyewear as a category will only have wider adaptation if the glasses are indistinguishable from non-tech eyewear and complement your looks, they can’t have the vibe of a tech gadget. We set out to create beautiful eyewear that we would be proud to sell even without any hidden technology and we work only with industry leading partners, with materials that you can find in traditional high-end eyewear, such as acetate from Mazzuchelli 1849 and lenses from Carl Zeiss Vision. Looking forward, we keep continuously finetuning our product experience and pushing the limits further for what’s possible at the intersection of audio and eyewear, experimenting with new materials and advancements in speaker technology. We have many exciting new drops and special projects already lined up for this year.

What inspires the designs? And who designs the models?

Aether as a brand itself is very much inspired by audio-visual culture around us. How we filter it creates our own unique viewpoint of the world and from there we derive the key source of inspiration behind the designs. We also have our customers in mind, who are all resolutely individual yet bonded by a common curiosity for what’s just beyond the horizon. There’s always a timeless quality behind our designs, and this is elevated further with some models that really push the expression forward. I’m responsible for the overall creative direction, but the designs of our models are done by some of the best eyewear designers of the industry.

What music do you listen to in your free time and do you listen to music while you work?

My work music tends to shift between calm background ambient when you need deeper focus (check out 36’s album ‘Stasis for Long-Distance Space Travel’), and progressive / house / techno sounds for more execution / experimental type of tasks. For my free time, it’s impossible to pin-point it down, as it varies from mood to mood, and can be anything from Beach House to Nils Frahm, from Maceo Plex to old bossa nova classics etc. But these days I’m tuning more frequently into podcasts in my free time (for which Aether glasses are also perfect), so here’s a shoutout to Lex Fridman, Tim Dillon and Andrew Huberman.