Trippi glasses

It started with a broken screen

A phone repair went wrong and the screen broke. Taking it apart and shining a light through the layers, Raz saw colours that should not have been there — caused by the polarising film inside the display.

Raz has worn glasses since the age of five, so the obvious next step was to put that effect in front of the eyes, everywhere: a 3D model, some printed frames, laser-cut filters, first prototypes.

What made it hard

Glasses are one of the least forgiving products there is. They sit on a face for hours, have to fit heads of every size, get sat on, dropped and folded, and a hinge is exactly the point where everything breaks.

It took around three months and twenty prototypes to get the balance right between rigidity, flexibility, fit and how it feels to look through them.

The answer to the hinge was to not have one. Both models use 3D-printed TPU joints — flexible, durable, with no single point of failure. We dropped both from over two metres onto concrete: the Night came out without a mark; the Day got scratches on the wood, and nothing else.

Two models

Trippi Night is for concerts, festivals and city lights at night — every point of light turns into a spectrum.

Trippi Day is a pair of sunglasses with polarised, UV-protecting lenses, and frames made from waste material — offcuts of plastic and wood sheet given a new shape.

A custom edition for Greyheads

Greyheads, a Rotterdam sextet mixing funk, rock, soul, jazz and hip hop, were invited to the North Sea Jazz Festival at Ahoy. Their bandleader wanted an accessory for the stage that screamed Greyheads. We designed and produced an edition of Trippi glasses after the cover of their debut album, Kytopia.

Ola, the display

To show the glasses off, we built Ola with Hohum Lab: a silver mannequin with lights in the eyes. Twist the strawberries in the mannequin’s hands and an Arduino changes the colour, brightness and rhythm of the light — so looking into those eyes feels like wearing a pair of Trippi Nights.

Where it stands

Trippi was Hola’s first product, sold through our own shop. It taught us the loop we now run for clients: prototype fast, break it on purpose, and only call it finished when it survives being used.