Monday 30 December 2019

you can turn the clock to zero, honey—i’ll sell the stock, we’ll spend all the money

Via fellow internet caretaker Miss Cellania, we learn the backstory to those novelty New Year’s glasses, concocted on one stoned evening in January of 1990 and put into production in time to herald in the next year by revelers and for the following years to come.
The duo behind the iconic variations, Richard Sclafani and Peter Cicero of Seattle, were schooled in the patent application process and realised that there was essentially no safe means of protecting one’s design from being knocked-off by competitors—yet they did register pairs of glasses for the next fourteen years and did have a good and profitable stint of success, until when the final year of the twentieth century appeared on the horizon with 2000 and too many opportunists saw the potential for easy profit. Those sales diminished and their marketing efforts undercut, both behind the phenomenon are grateful for their good run and the smiles they brought to people counting-down. Designers will again, after 2020, be challenged to come up with more clever frames.