Work / act iii / Genusee
Genusee
Eyewear made from the water bottles Flint was left with. A brand, a factory and a workforce, built at the same time.
- Years
- 2018 – 2022
- Role
- Co-founder & CEO. Also CMO, COO, creative director, product and packaging designer, and chair of the board.
- Scope
- Brand, product, manufacturing, supply chain, marketing, retail, P&L, hiring, fundraising
- Team
- 12 FTEs plus freelancers and agency partners
- Capability
- Brand · Product & design · Growth & GTM · Creator · Retail & partnerships
Genusee · one frame style, made from Flint water bottles
The situation
Could the waste be the product, and could the jobs stay in Flint?
I had been designing clothes in New York and had stopped being able to answer the question of why. I had spent time abroad working alongside women producing textiles, and came home to a city ninety minutes from where I grew up where the water was poisoned and the bottles were piling up.
Fifteen bottles a pair. Every step of the supply chain inside a 188-mile radius. One frame style, in a lot of colours, for four years.
Frames and assembly, Flint
What I did
- Built the brand from naming and identity through packaging, photography, site and tone of voice.
- Stood up a hyper-local supply chain: injection moulding, post-processing, assembly and lens fitting with a local optical lab.
- Trained a workforce with no prior eyewear manufacturing experience, deliberately hiring people the labour market had written off.
- Built a creator programme from zero to ~475 sustainability creators in 24 months, at ~90% gifting-to-organic-post conversion.
- Evolved the affiliate stack from commission codes to tracked links to revenue share across ShareASale and publishers.
- Landed retail and partnerships: Madewell, Anthropologie, Shopbop, Ace Hotels, Nordstrom, Shinola, Vans, the Detroit Pistons, Shopify, Hyundai.
- Ran owned, earned and paid campaigns to hundreds of millions of impressions, and owned the P&L underneath them.
Photographer: Sam Gold
The honest ending
Genusee sunset in 2022. Not because the brand failed. It had a cult following, national press and a 24% repeat rate on a single style. It closed because the unit economics no longer worked. Making glasses affordably, sustainably and ethically in Flint cost more than the market would pay for a frame made from recycled bottles.
Labour and lenses were about 60% of cost of goods. Lifetime value ran roughly 3× acquisition cost, which sounds healthy until you look at what was left after cost of goods: a single-digit gross margin per customer. We could have raised prices or moved production offshore. Both would have contradicted the two things the brand actually stood for. We chose to stop instead.
What it taught me: brand equity and unit economics are separate systems, and loving one does not fix the other. I now ask about gross margin in the first week of every engagement.
One frame style, four years
Projects inside this venture
475 creators from zero
Seven figures in revenue at 20×+ ROI, ~90% gifting-to-organic-post conversion, and an affiliate stack that grew from commission codes to tracked links to revenue share.
Artist collaborations and short films
Amber Vittoria on product and packaging. Amanda Edwards, a Flint artist, on a collaboration and a short film. ADIFF on design activism.
Retail, partnerships and popups
23+ stores in 10 states, plus brand partnerships, activations and popups.
‘The Future is Made in Flint’ out-of-home campaign
Wheatpasted posters across Flint, holiday 2019.
Making glasses in Flint
The supply chain, the factory and the workforce.
‘The Future is Made in Flint’
Community members on the plywood over empty storefronts.
Holiday 2019. We wheatpasted posters onto boarded-up buildings across Flint, in a city that had become national shorthand for failure. Taglines: Be The Generation You Want to See. For The People, By The People. Eyewear Made In Flint, Literally.
The people on the posters were community members doing the work of changing Flint. We made them the models and the stars of a campaign that ran across their own hometown. It cost almost nothing next to a media buy and it is still the piece of work people bring up first.
Installation, Flint
Photographer: Daniel Ribar
Collaborations, campaigns and popups
One frame style for four years meant the brand had to stay interesting some other way. It did that through who it showed up with.
‘The Future is Made in Flint’
Out-of-home campaign, holiday 2019
Genusee × Amber Vittoria
Artist collaboration on product and packaging
Genusee × Nena & Co
Handwoven cases, made with Nena & Co
Genusee × James Ada.ms
Editorial campaign photography
Shinola
Popup activation, Detroit
Also, without imagery here: Detroit Pistons × Shopify partnership (see it) · Genusee × Shopify video feature (see it) · Don Julio Casa Primavera popup activation · Nordstrom, Shinola, Vans, Hyundai and the State of Michigan
475 creators from zero
Built from nothing to roughly 475 niche sustainability creators over 24 months. Seven figures in revenue at more than 20× return on creator spend, and about 90% of gifted product turning into an organic post.
The method was brief plus guardrails, then trust. Creators know what performs with their own audience better than any brand does, so they got a point of view and room to adapt it rather than a script. One of those relationships, with the artist Amber Vittoria, scaled into a product collaboration.
The affiliate stack grew with it: commission codes, then tracked links, then revenue share across ShareASale, LTK and ShopMy.
Creator content, Genusee
Press from this work
VOGUE
Twice: the Flint upcycling story, and ‘United States of Fashion’, which named Genusee one of 56 brands changing the face of American fashion.
The New York Times
T Magazine editors’ picks, April 2018.
ABC World News Tonight
Two segments, including Made in America at Christmas 2019.
Air Mail
July 2021: ‘fashion isn’t cool unless it’s making the world a better place’.