The story of creating a truly unique mobile app for fitting and purchasing glasses by the Lookinar team.

Prehistory.

The market of frames and glasses is developing rapidly, showing a tendency for unique quality products. Major players have changed their strategies. Instead of producing similar models with famous brands’ logos, they make an emphasis on handmade and innovation.

While the market is in a state of uncertainty and industry giants, as Luxottica, Safilo, Kering, LVMH are experiencing a phase of transformation, small companies are finding their way to growth and intensive development.

The beginning.

One student of Berlin’s Higher Technical School, realized that the real future lies in sustainable innovative production. It should have been an outstanding product at an affordable price.

By bringing together professional designers and engineers, he founded new innovative eyewear manufacturer. The company aimed to create a simple and, at the same time, unique product - stylish high-quality glasses by clients’  face measurements.

The need for progress.

Manufacturer has been developing and attracting more clients. It became increasingly difficult to maintain the individual approach that the company professed.  But the team didn’t want to abandon it.

Fortunately, by that time augmented reality technology was already developing, and the company didn’t have to betray its principles.

Our client found a solution that allowed customers to immediately see their faces wearing custom-made glasses, and to have no hesitation in their choice.

Synergy.

At the time of meeting Lookinar, german manufacturer has received several offers from companies from Canada, India and Russia. Our company did not promise to do it cheaply or quickly, we went the other way.

Сonsidering the complexity of development, the novelty of the technology and the common goal of creating a truly cool product, we offered to develop an MVP at our own expense.

Three weeks after the start of work on MVP, Lookinar signed a contract. Developing the main application has begun.

Development

The initial purpose of the application was to enable users to try on glasses in augmented reality. But as it developed, the ideas became more and more ambitious.
Tо begin, we added the option of changing colors, then a personal cabinet and the “Cart” function.

The first presentation of the application at a trade show in Germany gave excellent results and opened up new challenges. When taking off the glasses, some people could not see themselves on the phone screen in virtual glasses, because of poor eyesight.
We were looking for a solution and created a video function with a big record button for convenience.  It helped users to look at themselves from the outside in a new outfit.

We realized it is a great idea for promotion in social networks. So we added sharing features - now bloggers can post selfies and ask their audience what color and model suits them best.

Once the basic functionality was completed, the application was passed on to our partner opticians for testing. They asked to implement the function of “Nearest optician” so that the user could immediately build the shortest route and get expert advice. We have created a database of partner opticians, configured the function of determining the distance, and connected it to Google Maps.
After repeated testing and communication with stakeholders,  it’s been decided to add the ability for users to do engraving.

Then the opticians asked to add functionality for sending a recipe, booking a meeting time, and much more.

The Final or new start.

Starting with a simple idea of demonstrating the models of glasses in augmented reality, we have created a multifunctional platform to choose one’s unique style in augmented reality. There are a lot of new ideas ahead of us! Such as creating a standalone purchase system without physical communication, adding payment features, and much more.

Want to test our application in action?
The app is only available for iPhone 10 or newer.