Smith Optics

Smith Optics started with an orthodontist who paid for lift tickets in goggles. Bob Smith built the first prototypes at his kitchen table with dental tools and foam, and he often traded early versions for lift tickets, according to his obituary. The company he founded in 1965 now has its manufacturing headquarters in Clearfield, Utah.

The problem was fog. Smith had the idea as an Army dentist in Germany in the late 1950s, skiing in Austria on weekends, and he told Powder magazine in 1981 that in powder, snow got in through the vent holes and the humidity went up inside a single-lens goggle. He opened an orthodontic practice in Marin County, California, in 1960, and after he married Jean in 1964 the two started wintering in Alta, Utah. Their fix was a second lens, which a Smith product executive says traps a pocket of air that works as insulation. Smith was granted U.S. Patent 3,377,626 in April 1968.

The fixes kept coming. The company says it added a Roll Off film system for motocross goggles in 1984, and later the Turbo Fan vent and interchangeable sunglass lenses. It now counts more than 50 utility patents. Its own history says the US manufacturing base moved from Colorado to Idaho and eventually to Utah.

Clearfield is where it lands now. Smith's blog says the 120,000-square-foot plant, called MFG, employs 125 people who represent 19 nationalities, including several families with more than one generation on the floor. It describes the work as heavy on handwork and puts a lens safety lab and a goggle design house under the same roof, and says the building prints goggle straps and turns out more than one million products a year. Prescription lenses for glasses and sunglasses are ground there to order and shipped straight to the customer.

Safilo, an Italian eyewear group, bought Smith in 1996. In 2014 it announced that the global Smith business would be led out of Safilo headquarters, with design, product development and e-commerce moving to Portland, Oregon. The same announcement said Safilo would concentrate all of its sports-brand ski goggle manufacturing in Clearfield, so the decisions left and the factory stayed. Smith's product pages say it assembles select products in Clearfield, which is a narrower claim than making everything there.

The kitchen table now covers 120,000 square feet, which is a lot of table for a man who often settled up in lift tickets.