From Étretat to Thirty Frames: Inside French Eyewear Brand Aude Hérouard

Aude Hérouard spent years fitting other people's frames before she drew her own.

She trained as an optician at Le Lanchon in Rouen, a lunetier of long standing, and learned the trade from the side most eyewear founders never see. The precise gestures. The visagiste's read of a face. What separates a well-made frame from one that merely looks the part. Most independent brands in this category are started by people arriving from fashion or retail, who design frames as objects first. Hérouard came at it from fitting and adjustment, where you learn how a frame behaves on a face over years.

Her first sunglass collection launched in 2020. The optical range followed for the 23-24 season, once the sunglasses had found their audience.

The palette is the inheritance

Read the colour names across the collections and the Normandy childhood surfaces in the product.

The sunglasses are named from food and land: Abricot, Bourgogne, Cerisier, Raisin, Sarrasin, Houblon, Grenade, Miel, Olive, Café, Cuivre, Ardoise, Sépia, Sienne, Lait, Taupe, Tabac, Ambre, Prune.

The optical range shifts register toward animals and weather: Tortue, Écureuil, Noisette, Châtaigne, Nougat, Orage, Tempête, Fumée.

Buckwheat, hops, chestnut, copper, slate, storm. A palette assembled from a farming county holds together as a range in a way that trend-led colour rarely does, and it explains why the collections read as one body of work rather than a sequence of seasons.

The individual tones are described with precision rather than atmosphere. Pigeon is a transparent grey-green, faintly blue, characterised as mineral. Sauge is a diluted green. Lens colour is assigned model by model — brown, black or green, chosen against the acetate rather than defaulted to grey.

Colour as the organising system

The range now runs to roughly thirty named models and roughly thirty colourways.

Twenty sit in the sunglass collection: Suzon, Edith, Armelle, Paule, Marthe, Lou, Gisèle, Marianne, Jeannie, Félicie, Annette, Nicole, Odile, Marie-Astrid, Michèle, Amélie, Benoite, Françoise, Christiane, Brigitte. Sorted six ways by shape, at €390.

Ten sit in optical: Aimée, Henriette, Andrée, Jeanne, Raymonde, Marcelle, Claude, Charlie, Evelyne, Rose. Five shape families, at €420, and described by the brand as the product of rigorous drawing toward forms with character and correct proportion.

Each model appears in four to nine colourways. Odile runs to nine, Marianne matches it, Françoise and Gisèle come in eight, Marthe in four. That ratio inverts standard practice, where a collection expands outward through silhouette and offers two or three finishes per model. Building depth instead moves the decision. The question stops being which shape suits the face and becomes how present the frame should be on it.

Capsule CIEL runs across several models, including Armelle, Paule, Marianne and Jeannie, as a colour story threaded through existing shapes rather than a separate sub-line.

The models carry women's names throughout, drawn from figures in Hérouard's own circle and described as distinct temperaments. It departs from the numbered references standard in the trade, and it disciplines the range — a new model has to justify itself as a character the collection does not already hold.

What the training left behind

The optician's grounding shows in the engineering.

The nose bridge is designed toward universality across the collection, treated as the comfort component rather than a styling detail. The sunglasses are drawn for an oversize effect while being cut to sit across a range of face widths, two objectives that usually pull against each other.

Françoise measures 47mm at the lens, 24mm at the bridge, 145mm at the temple. Those figures sit on the product page alongside the fitting rules the brand uses to assess a frame: the eyebrow lightly covered or underlined, clearance at the cheekbone so the frame does not ride when the wearer smiles, the eye centred on the one-third/two-thirds line for prescription work. Fit is the sticking point in online eyewear sales, and most direct-to-consumer brands minimise it rather than publish it.

The same instinct runs through the aftercare. The brand tells customers the bio-acetate will matte with seawater, sun and perspiration, and that an optician can re-polish it back to condition. The material is temperature-sensitive and loosens with handling, so the advice is a re-setting at least twice a year. Each pair ships with a soap developed specifically for washing the frames, alongside an organic cotton pouch, a microfibre and a storage box. The warranty runs two years.

Made by hand, in small series

Everything is made in France. The acetate is Italian bio-acetate — wood pulp, cotton fibre and plant-derived binders, hypoallergenic and recyclable. Lenses are Italian organic, category 2 or 3, anti-reflective on the inner face. Assembly, polishing, rhabillage and quality control are carried out by hand in French workshops.

Prototyping runs several months per model and moves in sequence: pure form first, then that form articulated against the selected colours, then finishing. Hérouard identifies polishing as the decisive stage, since it governs how the material ages and how the frame takes its patina. It is also the step most exposed when a production schedule compresses.