A story of defiance: oakley celebrates 50 years of breaking boundaries

Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 29 October 2025: A brand that for fifty years hasn’t just predicted the future but has created it. A brand that never shied away from being authentic to its beliefs and values.  

The 50th anniversary isn’t a reflection. It’s a launch signal. A challenge to rewrite what comes next. To see beyond. To reimagine everything. To abandon the loop of “what’s always been” and create “what could be” - through disruption, design, and defiance. The art of seeing what isn’t there and building it anyway. If evolution took too long, we sabotaged the clock.  

The truth: we have never needed a logo. Our mark lives in the feeling, the design, and the vision. Design, innovation and storytelling, wrapped in art.  

“Oakley has always shaped the edge of possibility, and then stepped off it,” said Caio Amato, Global President of Oakley. “That legacy lives in all of us as an invitation to keep igniting human possibilities further. Fifty years isn’t just a celebration of what we’ve done. It is a call to re-imagine harder, build bolder, and shape our limitless future with the same rebellious optimism that brought us here. We are not predicting the next 50 years. We are creating it now!” 

IT STARTED WITH A BETTER GRIP AND IT GRIPPED THE WORLD FROM THERE 

Our story didn’t begin in a lab or a boardroom. It started with a moto grip, ingenuity and some wild ideas in 1975. Our founder, Jim Jannard, was once a lone innovator slinging motorcycle parts with a belief that wouldn’t quit: “everything in the world can and will become better. It’s just a matter of when and by whom.” 

This vision took hold on the moto handlebar, the point where a human met machine. Jim imagined a grip material that molded to the hand, got tackier with sweat, and elevated control the harder the rider pushed. He called it Unobtainium™. 

From this breakthrough came five decades of defiance and disruption. 

With a rogue R+D crew stacked with pro BMX riders, we operated in an orbit where athletes weren’t just giving insights; they influenced and evolved the brand. Our culture and terrain became live test labs, and every crash, every cracked lens, and bent frame became data from the front lines of physical performance. 

Viewing the world as raw material and elite athletes as embedded field agents marked the origin of our rebellious DNA. Not just adapting to the world but reimagining it entirely to deliver the unexpected. 

A VISION SYSTEM BUILT FOR THE EDGE OF HUMAN POTENTIAL 

In a world where vision defines survival, we engineered a new way to see, pioneering performance eye protection at the edge of what’s physically and visually possible. 

To do this, we looked beyond eyewear designers, enlisting visionaries from transportation, architecture, industrial design, and robotics to redefine what eyewear could be—building systems where function, fit, and feel were inseparable.