SAN DIEGO – Blenders Eyewear continues to sharpen its focus in the sunglasses market, gaining ground in college football with its sights set on moving into the music and entertainment industries in the future.
The 12-year-old company has begun its second season of partnering with University of Colorado Buffaloes football coach Deion Sanders, the former National Football League star, on his line of sunglasses, and has a new deal with the University of Colorado for its own group of specialized sunglasses for the campus crowd in Boulder.
Founder and CEO
Blenders Eyewear
Blenders is also following up a successful Name Image Likeness deal from last men’s basketball season with the San Diego State University Aztecs with even greater support of the SDSU football team this season. Blenders Eyewear has committed to contributing $100,000 to SDSU’s NIL collective through the sale of specially branded sunglasses.
Blenders Eyewear founder and CEO Chase Fisher said making “meaningful impact” through these partnerships has excelled the brand “and allowed us to go places we haven’t been before and do things we haven’t done.”
The company at the end of 2019 was valued at $90 million, when Safilo Group acquired a majority stake in Blenders.
Fisher said it’s been exciting to watch the company grow as a small grassroots brand –started with Fisher slinging sunglasses from his backpack on San Diego beaches – “to the bright lights, the main stage of the football world.”
“It’s a very exciting time for us, piggybacking off last year’s success,” Fisher said.
The success was like nothing Fisher could have imagined. The weekend of the announcement of the partnership in September 2023, Blenders and Sanders generated more than $4 million in sales, which Fisher said was the largest organic sales day in the company’s history. At its peak, a pair of sunglasses was preordered every 10 seconds.
“Last year was just truly a groundbreaking year, a transformational year when it comes to Blenders,” he said. “The trajectory, the opportunity now is right. Never in our company’s history have we had more eyeballs, more impressions, more opportunity or more recognition. And never have we been on the world stage like we like we have been in the last year.”
Fisher would not share details of the multi-year contract with Sanders – known as “Prime Time” when he played and now is called “Coach Prime” – but said the first edition of Prime Eyewear sold 200,000 units, with Sanders getting a percentage of sales. Revenue from last year’s sales of the Prime sunglasses is estimated at more than $13 million, according to Front Office Sports. About 2 million units of Blenders Eyewear products are sold annually.
This year, along with Sanders, Blenders has also begun a historic NIL brand deal with Peggy Coppom – a 99-year-old University of Colorado “superfan.” Blenders designed a limited-edition “Peggy Sleeve” with a portion of each sleeve sold donated to Coppom and her family.
SDSU Alum CEO Gives Back
Blenders Eyewear’s collaboration with the Aztec Link, a collective dedicated to helping SDSU student-athletes pursue NIL opportunities, is a limited-edition design called “BE THE A1PHA.”
Sales of the exclusive pairs of sunglasses are supporting SDSU football student-athletes. There will only be 5,000 pairs available of the bold black and red design set in the company’s Meister x2 silhouette and that retail for $79.
Blenders Eyewear has committed to contributing $100,000 to Aztec Link, an NIL collective dedicated to partnering student-athletes at SDSU with businesses for promotional and endorsement opportunities. It also lays out a path to provide fans meaningful connections to their favorite teams and players.
Last basketball season in its first collaboration with SDSU athletics, Blenders sold out of 1,000 signature TWELVE March Radness sunglasses, raising $75,000 in collaboration with the SDSU men’s basketball team in NIL efforts.
Partner
Prolific Sports Management
Brian Boermeester, a partner at Prolific Sports Management, is working with Blenders for the SDSU football team’s NIL partnership, and said Fisher is a trailblazer in the NIL arena.
“You have a lot of donors and alums donating, but actually putting their brand behind it and doing a true NIL deal, Chase was really the first to do that,” Boermeester said. “And you know we were the second school behind Coach Prime in Colorado for him to get behind, and I think that’s a pretty big deal. Everybody knows Prime, so for Chase to say, ‘I want to support my community, I want to support San Diego State and these players,’ I think it shows other brands and other alums that you can give back to your school but you can also do more.”
Fisher said that as a graduate of SDSU, giving back to the place that “sparked my hustle hits home.”
Fisher said he is also interested in being a mentor to student-athletes who are interested in the business world and adding insight to their future as leaders and working to better the San Diego business community.
“We can actually partner with student-athletes, raise up the community, give back to the community in a meaningful way,” he said. “The brand is reaching new heights and it’s really exciting to see where the brand is going.”
Next Up: The Music Scene
Fisher calls the company “unconventional” and said he’s been “a risk taker since day one.”
“At Blenders, we love pioneering new frontiers, we love breaking boundaries, we love being first and we love pushing the envelope of what’s possible,” he said. “And that’s kind of why we’ve been successful. We didn’t follow the rule book we didn’t we didn’t really do things in a conventional way.”
Blenders has his sights set on moving further into the sports world, with partnerships being sought with other universities around the country.
He also said his company has its sights set on other industries – think the stage and screen.
“I’m committed to change and to the future,” Fisher said, “and that future is music, it’s entertainment, it’s sports. And it’s also giving back in a meaningful way that lifts the communities up, lifts athletes up, and really allows us to get involved in a way that no other company has.”
Fisher said the company has never had more opportunities or more impressions (more than 1 million on social media) than it has this past year.
“We’re really understanding how we want to maximize this,” Fisher said. “We don’t want to just go buck wild and spread ourselves too thin. I’m really committed to this NIL space I’m really committed to the schools that were that we’re partnering with right now. I really want to create a best-in-class relationship with Colorado and the same thing with San Diego State.”
Blenders Eyewear
FOUNDED: 2012
FOUNDER: Chase Fisher
HEADQUARTERS: San Diego
BUSINESS: Retail sunglasses
EMPLOYEES: 80
WEBSITE: blenderseyewear.com
CONTACT: 866-256-1196
SOCIAL IMPACT: After successfully raising $75,000 for the SDSU men’s basketball team for NIL efforts, the company is looking to raise $100,000 for the SDSU football team
NOTABLE: The company started when Fisher borrowed $2,000 from his roommate to put toward selling sunglasses out of his backpack on the beach while working his surf coach job.
