Free delivery over GH₵ 400 · Adjustments free for as long as you own them
About
We make glasses, and we are quite particular about it
Designed and cut in Accra since 2011, sold in nine shops, and fitted by people who will still be adjusting them in three years.
Afia Boateng started Iris in 2011 with one mill, a rented room in Spintex and a very specific complaint.
She had spent a decade fitting other people's frames as an optometrist, and she had watched the same thing happen every week: somebody with a broad bridge and a wide face trying on a frame designed for neither, being told it suited them, and quietly not wearing it. Almost every frame on sale in Accra was imported, and almost none of it was cut for the people buying it.
So Iris makes its own. The acetate comes from Italy in sheets, because nobody mills it here yet, and everything after that happens at Spintex: cutting, shaping, ten days in the tumbler, riveting, glazing. Fifteen years later there are nine shops, forty-one people, and the same complaint pinned to the wall above the bench.
How a frame is made
Four weeks, and about eleven pairs of hands
The sheet arrives
Bio-acetate, milled in Italy from cotton rather than crude, in sheets about six millimetres thick. We buy the colour a year ahead because that is how long it takes to make.
The front is cut
A five-axis mill takes the front out of the sheet in one pass. Everything after that is done by hand, which is the part that costs money and the part you can feel.
Ten days in the drum
The fronts go into a tumbler with beech chips and pumice for a week and a half. It is the only way to get an edge that is polished rather than merely smooth.
Then your prescription
Lenses are cut and edged at Spintex, checked against the script twice, and fitted by the person who is going to hand them to you.
Years cutting frames in Accra
Shops, from Osu to Takoradi
Frames cut last year
For an eye test, start to finish
Forty-one of us
The four you are most likely to meet
Afia Boateng
Founder and head of design
Akua Mensah
Workshop lead, Spintex
Adjoa Nyarko
Principal optometrist
Serwaa Antwi
Head of shops
The awkward part
Three things we will not do
We will not run a permanent sale
Two reductions a year, both because we are stopping a colour, both ending on a stated date. A shop with a sale on every week is not generous, it is a shop with the wrong prices printed on the label.
We will not upsell a coating you do not need
Blue-light filters are worth less than the internet believes and we say so, out loud, in the shop, at the cost of about GH₵ 90 a customer. Anti-reflective for night driving is worth every cedi and we say that too.
We will not make fifteen versions of anything
Sixteen products, total. It means a colour you love will one day be gone for good, which people do complain about. The alternative is a wall of near-identical frames and nobody on the floor who knows any of them.
Eye tests
Twenty-five minutes, GH₵ 120, and it comes off the frame
Every shop has an optometrist and a full test room. Book one at whichever is nearest and the fee comes straight off anything you buy that day.
