6 things you don't know about Marcolin

In 2021 it celebrated 60 years in business. During these 60 years Marcolin, the Italian company from Longarone that designs, manufactures and distributes eyewear worldwide, has gone a very long way. The 15 million pairs of glasses sold on average every year are a testament to this. But so are other figures.

Since 1968, Marcolin started speaking many languages. As an addition to its first 8 distributor network in the United States, another location opened in France in 1976, and the company soon expanded its presence worldwide with 15 branches in the US, Brazil, Asia, Mexico, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

It’s a young company: 69% of its approximately 2000 employees are aged under 50 years, and 57% of them are women. And they are all engaged with vocational education and training: just think that over the past year they had over 5600 hours of training.

Today Marcolin distributes eyewear for more than 20 licensed brands in over 125 countries and has 1 proprietary brand (Web Eyewear).

One of its keys to success is the “time factor”: the creation of every new frame takes 11 months of hard work in Longarone. It’s the time needed to go from an idea to its design to the creation of a prototype –requiring great artisanal skills and precision- up to the selection of materials and colors and then the manufacturing phase.

But eyewear manufacturing also takes time. The time needed to carry out over 60 steps including, just to mention a few, temple and front creation, assembling, tumbling, cutting, and lens insertion. And then refinement, the phase where the frames are personalized, and adjusting, when all the components of a frame are checked.

Choco-camel or “foliage” tones. These are just two of the endless color options (and lens-frame combos) that are available today. But, whatever color is selected, to verify lens compliance with existing regulations and before and after any frame hits the market, a great number of optical and mechanical tests are conducted. Testing is carried out in-house by our Product Quality and Compliance Department and by the Marcolin Certification Lab, as well as by qualified third-party laboratories.