The Cedar Forest

GRAEL began on a rainy November morning on the edge of a cedar forest outside Squamish, British Columbia — the exact kind of overcast, mineral light that makes the Pacific coast look like nowhere else on earth.

We set out to build eyewear for the generation that grew up here: people who move between a downtown studio and a coastal trailhead in the same afternoon, who want something that looks considered in a boardroom and survives a scramble up granite. Not a luxury house's idea of “outdoorsy,” and not a big-box knockoff of a design house original — something built, priced, and named for this specific place.

Every GRAEL frame is cut from Italian cellulose acetate and assembled with 5-barrel steel hinges, then named after the coastline that shaped it — Tofino, Squamish, Cypress, the Seymour. We sell direct, without a licensed-brand markup, so the frames stay reasonably priced without cutting the one thing that matters: how they hold up.

We're just getting started, and we're building this brand from British Columbia, for British Columbia, first.