The global eyewear market generates well over $150 billion annually.
When Nana Boateng Osei launched Bôhten, he wasn’t trying to build another fashion brand. He was responding to a problem he and his brother, Nana Kwadwo Osei, had experienced for years as eyewear consumers.
For much of the industry’s history, mainstream eyewear design has been built around a relatively narrow set of fit assumptions. According to Boateng, many frames failed to adequately account for facial features commonly found among African and African-American consumers, creating a gap that Bôhten would later seek to address.
The brothers grew up between Ghana, the United Kingdom, the United States, and South Africa. Eyewear was something they shared, collected, and paid attention to. Yet many of the frames they encountered were not designed with people who looked like them in mind.
Founded in Canada and later expanded into Ghana, Bôhten began with frames crafted from reclaimed African wood. From the beginning, the company’s objective was straightforward: create eyewear that addressed an overlooked fit challenge while building products connected to the places and communities that inspired them.
That cross-continental foundation would go on to shape the company itself. Bôhten emerged at the intersection of African design, global consumer markets, and the experience of a diaspora founder building across multiple geographies.
The Decision to Redesign
A wooden eyewear brand is a positioning, but it is also a constraint.
The material sets limits on silhouette, production flexibility, and where the design can go. As Bôhten moved through its first decade, the founders recognized that expanding the brand’s design range would require expanding the material palette.
During the COVID period, while much of the industry was contracting, the Bôhten team was working through a redesign. They brought in consultants from the United Kingdom, Italy, and Ghana to study fit architecture and silhouette engineering. The result was a complete redesign of the brand’s temple and fit system, along with the introduction of acetate as a primary material.
The first acetate collection, the Duru Family, marked a turning point. Acetate opened up colorways, shapes, and construction approaches that wood could not support at scale.
Bôhten was no longer simply a wooden eyewear company. It had evolved into an eyewear brand with a defined design philosophy and the flexibility to execute it across a broader range of products.
Since then, the company has released more than 15 styles and over 40 colorways. Yet many consumers still associate Bôhten primarily with its early wood collections. Part of the brand’s current focus is reintroducing customers to how much the company has evolved.
Engineering as Philosophy
The concept “We See You” sits at the center of how Bôhten communicates today, but it began as a product observation.
Measurements that much of the eyewear industry treated as standard were not necessarily developed with African and African-American consumers in mind. Rather than treating that as a marketing opportunity, Bôhten made fit the engineering priority.
The brand’s positioning, “engineered to fit your face,” reflects a product development process built around facial proportions the founders believed were underserved by much of the category. Over time, that philosophy expanded into identity, storytelling, customer experience, and community building, but the product remains at the center of it.
The company’s virtual try-on experience follows the same logic. If fit was the original insight, helping customers evaluate fit before purchasing becomes a natural extension of that commitment.
Bôhten is also developing online vision care capabilities that would allow customers to complete eye exams and purchase prescription eyewear through a single experience.
Building Distribution From the Ground Up
Beyond its direct-to-consumer platform, Bôhten has been stocked by retail partners including Nordstrom and Shopbop and has presented at New York Fashion Week.
Those relationships helped expand the brand’s visibility across broader consumer audiences, but today the company’s focus is increasingly centered on building direct relationships with its core customers.
Through events, showrooms, and owned community channels, Bôhten is investing in a more connected customer experience. The company operates showrooms in both Toronto and Ghana, using those spaces as more than retail locations.
They serve as feedback infrastructure, allowing the team to observe how frames fit, gather customer insights in real time, and incorporate those learnings into future product development.
The tariff environment and currency volatility across multiple markets have sharpened the operational discipline behind this approach. The company plans three to six months ahead on logistics.
Building a community that comes directly to Bôhten reduces the exposure that comes with depending heavily on intermediary channels in an increasingly unpredictable global supply environment.
Thirteen Years of Building
Bôhten’s founding logic was simple: identify a customer need that was being overlooked and build a better product around it.
Over the past thirteen years, that idea has grown into a brand with international distribution, a design architecture built around fit science, and a community-focused growth strategy designed to strengthen direct customer relationships.
The company is planning flagship locations that combine eyewear retail, vision care services, and customer education within a single environment. Future initiatives will continue to explore how technology can improve access to eye care while creating a more seamless purchasing experience.
Like many growing consumer brands, Bôhten now faces a familiar challenge: whether the insight that inspired the company can continue to support its next stage of growth.
More than a decade after launch, the business is still building around the same premise that shaped its earliest products—better fit, stronger representation, and greater access to quality eyewear.
The collections have evolved, the distribution has expanded, and the technology continues to advance, but the problem the company set out to solve remains at the center of the brand.
Exclusive Offer for Shoppe Black Readers
Bôhten has provided Shoppe Black readers with an exclusive 25% discount on its eyewear collections. Use code SHOPPEBLK25 at checkout or click below to access the offer automatically.
