According to the data gathered over a three month period from Sept 07 to Nov 07, the most popular sunglasses worn by today’s leading celebrities include, in order of ‘sighting volume’ were Ray-Ban, Oakley, Dior, Gucci, Oliver Peoples, Tom Ford, Prada and Chrome Hearts.
Over this period 154 celebrities were tracked wearing 51 brands of sunglasses in dozens of models. Repeated occurrences of one celebrity wearing the same glasses were not included in the results.
For the data driven among you, Ray-Ban with 35 celebrity sightings outpaced their nearest competitors by almost 2 to 1, with Oakley and Dior showing up on 20 celebrities each. No wonder Oakley bought Ray-Ban! A detailed grid of the results is shown below.
The stragglers were Gucci with 18 sightings, Oliver Peoples – 17, Tom Ford – 15, Prada – 12 and Chrome Hearts came in last at 10 sightings.
Considering the average cost of these individual brands (at least for this review) these numbers are not surprising. The average price for a pair of celebrity Ray-Ban’s is about $120. The Chrome Hearts sunglasses are a little steeper, averaging $500 a pair.
The cost of these sunglasses varied from a low of $50, seen on Britney Spears sporting a pair of convenience store sunglasses (Anthropologie’s Glamorama) to the most outrageously expensive pair from Nefarious called Auric, flaunted by the ubiquitous Lindsay Lohan with a slightly higher price tag of $30,000.
As many consumers tend to buy what their idols and icons are wearing, supposedly in hopes of recreating the ‘A list’ effect, it is interesting to find that the average pair of celebrity sunglasses doesn’t cost nearly as much as you might think.
Although market research in the U.S. places the average pair of sunglasses for both men and women in the under $30 range, men actually spending somewhat more than women, a huge consumer market exists for higher end sunglasses and there are dozens of players vying for their piece of this enormous multi-billion dollar market. Why else would Luxottica pay $2.1 billion for the purchase of Oakley?
So what does it really cost to look like your favorite celebrity? Throwing out the low and high end sunglasses mentioned above, the average retail price of pair of sunglasses as seen on America’s most famous celebrities was actually only $269.
Now for most folks from the heartland that is a tidy sum to be plunking down in the hopes that someone will mistake them for Britney, Jessica, Lindsay, Angelina or Brad.
But considering this youth oriented culture has tens of millions of youth oriented consumers (including those aging baby-boomers from the sixties and seventies) who shell out hundreds, even thousands of dollars for brand name blue jeans, sneakers, t-shirts and jackets, not to mention alcohol and sports drinks, make-up, jewelry and handbags, the above price tag looks almost reasonable.