Ray Ban Sunglasses and Price

Nowadays, Ray-Ban sunglasses can be found selling for as much as $300 at high-end stores like Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus. The brand recently opened its first ever flagship store, a sleek emporium in the heart of Manhattan’s shopping mecca, SoHo. And if you walk around capitals like London, Paris and Milan, it seems like anyone remotely stylish is sporting the shades.

But not that long ago, in 1999, the brand was in a shambles, with its once-pioneering wares on sale for $19 at countless gas stations and convenience stores. And the quality was awful: Ray-Ban was using antiquated tooling and its frames were flimsy.

It was at that rock-bottom point that Italian eyewear giant Luxottica bought Bausch & Lomb’s eyewear brands, with Ray-Ban as the deal’s crown jewel, for $640 million in 1999. And thanks to an aggressive turnaround plan, Ray-Ban staged a remarkable comeback, one that it is working hard to keep going. In 2000, Ray-Ban generated 252 million euros for Luxottica, or 10% of company sales. By 2014, that had risen more than eightfold to 2.065 billion euros, or 27% of Luxottica sales. Ray-Bay now commands 5% of the global eye wear market, and is the largest sunglasses brand, according to Euromonitor International data.

Before its decline, Ray-Ban had held a dominant spot in American popular culture, thanks to appearances in classic films from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Top Gun. But looking to boost sales, B&L transformed Ray-Ban into a mass-market brand.

1961: Audrey Hepburn sporting Ray-Bans in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s.Photograph courtesy of Paramount Pictures/Getty Images

In its ability to bounce back, Ray-Ban is one of the lucky ones. Few high-end brands that flirt with the low-end live to tell the tale, as other brands have found when they’ve lowered prices in a bid to join the “accessible luxury” market. So the Ray-Ban case instructive for many labels looking to win back their aura..

Luxottica’s Chief Marketing Officer, Stefano Volpetti, recently spoke with Fortune about how the company returned luster to the iconic brand and what its doing to keep the momentum going.

Case: Ray-Ban

The Ray-Ban brand first emerged as a major player in eyewear in 1929 when the Air Force asked Bausch & Lomb to develop a new kind of eyewear that would protect pilots’ eyes from glare without compromising how well they could see. In 1936, Ray-Ban sold the resulting glasses, Aviator-style shades, to the public for the first time, and an American icon was born.

The ethos of coolness and technical innovation was what Luxottica was looking to revive when it bought Ray-Ban. But first it had to clean up the brand.

Phase 1: Better product, better stores (early 2000’s)

When Luxottica bought Ray-Ban, it says, the brand’s frames fell apart four times faster than those of Luxottica’s other brands. In 2000, Luxottica consolidated production of Ray-Ban sunglasses from four outdated facilities in different areas of the world to a state of the art facility in Italy, where Luxottica manufactured other brands in its portfolio. Northeast Italy is known as a hub for premium eyewear, with the added benefit of proximity to quality parts suppliers.