Stoggles, a Stylish Spin on Safety Goggles, Seals $40 Million

Pat Maio
Pat Maio has held various reporting and editorial management positions over the past 25 years, having specialized in business and government reporting. He has held reporting jobs with the San Diego Union-Tribune, Orange County Register, Dow Jones News and other newspapers in Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.
Stoggles, a Stylish Spin on Safety Goggles, Seals $40 Million
Image courtesy of Stoggles
  • The Pasadena eyewear startup has found a market with health care workers and is looking to grow with new investment from L.A.-based The Chernin Group.

Safety goggles are usually anything but stylish. But just as direct-to-consumer brands FIGS and Clove brought sophistication and flair to medical scrubs and health care shoes, respectively, so is Stoggles looking to spice up its own dull niche.


“We are the FIGS for faces,” according to Rahul Khatri, co-founder of the Pasadena-based safety eyewear brand. Stoggles—a playful combination of words “style” and “goggles”—has found traction with buyers who work in medical fields and are tired of donning bulky protective goggles while in surgery or tending to patients. The company offers a sleek, trendy look in bright colors like lilac, coral red, and mint green, as well as prescription lenses and bifocals.

On Wednesday, Stoggles disclosed a growth equity raise of $40 million led by Los Angeles-based investment firm The Chernin Group, which focuses on consumer brands in media and tech. (Among Chernin’s investments include West Hollywood-based neo-bank Dave and Pasadena-based youth sports streaming service BallerTV.)

Stoggles, which is eyeing a new headquarters location in Culver City or West Hollywood, generated more than $13.5 million in revenue last year, according to the company. The new funding will help the 15-person company triple its current headcount by the end of the year, Khatri said.

Stoggles co-founders Max Greenberg (left) and Rahul Khatri.Image courtesy of Stoggles

The startup isn’t the first rodeo for Khatri and his co-founder Max Greenberg, who met as students at Pasadena’s ArtCenter College of Design in 2015. By the following year, they had started Roav, an athletic eyewear brand specializing in foldable, high-performance sunglasses. While the startup raised $225,000 through crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, the concept never really caught on as hoped in a fiercely competitive market for sunglasses. (Roav continues to operate with less than $1 million in annual sales, according to Khatri.)

The pandemic proved to be the catalyst for a new venture separate from Roav for the duo. In mid-2020, after Greenberg showed Khatri an illustration he found on Instagram of a pair of retro-looking goggles, the industrial designers agreed that they could produce something better. Their creative doodling came as public health officials were urging people to wear face shields to protect themselves from the spread of COVID-19.

The confluence of events—the illustration and the pandemic—led the two designers to the concept of protective eyewear with a chic flair. Stoggles launched last year after raising around $3.5 million through a crowdfunding campaign.

Now, doctors and surgeons are buying the brand’s glasses to protect their eyes from germs and fluids, firefighters use them to shield their eyes from smoke and chefs use them to keep from tearing up while slicing onions. Stoggles glasses start at $39 each, though the price can rise to nearly $200 as prescription lenses with anti-fog coating and bifocals are added.

Stoggles may be ramping up its business at an opportune time. According to research from optical industry trade group The Vision Council, sales of frames and lenses in the U.S. began rebounding in 2021, after diving during the first year of the pandemic in 2020.

Nearly 65 million pairs of frames and more than 72 million pairs of lenses were sold in 2020—down from nearly 79 million pairs frames and nearly 88 million pairs of lenses in 2019, according to the research. However, frame and lens sales showed significant growth through the first nine months of 2021, climbing 27% over the same period in 2020 and “actually increas[ing] above pre-pandemic levels,” according to Vision Council spokesperson Hayley Rakus.

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The Impact of Authentic Storytelling. LA Latino/a Founders and Funders Tell All

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

The Impact of Authentic Storytelling. LA Latino/a Founders and Funders Tell All
Decerry Donato

As one of the most diverse cities in the world, Los Angeles is home to almost 5 million people who identify as Hispanic or Latinx. Yet, many feel they still lack representation in the city’s tech space.

“I can safely say that last year’s LA tech week hosted all of the events on the west side, and very few were focused on telling Latino and Latina entrepreneurial stories,” said Valeria Martinez, investor at VamosVentures. “We wanted to change that this year.”

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LA Tech Week Day 3: Social Highlights
Evan Xie

L.A. Tech Week has brought venture capitalists, founders and entrepreneurs from around the world to the California coast. With so many tech nerds in one place, it's easy to laugh, joke and reminisce about the future of tech in SoCal.

Here's what people are saying about day three of L.A. Tech Week on social:

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LA Tech Week: Female Founders Provide Insights Into Their Startup Journeys

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

LA Tech Week: Female Founders Provide Insights Into Their Startup Journeys
Decerry Donato

Women remain a minority among startup founders. According to Pitchbook, even though women-led startups in the United States received a record $20.8 billion in funding during the first half of 2022, U.S. companies with one or more female founders received less than 20% of total venture funding in 2022. U.S. companies solely led by female founders received less than 2% of the total funding.

The panel, titled Female Founders: Planning, Pivoting, Profiting, was moderated by NYU law professor Shivani Honwad and featured Anjali Kundra, co-founder of bar inventory software Partender; Montré Moore, co-founder of the Black-owned beauty startup AMP Beauty LA; Mia Pokriefka, co-founder and CEO of the interactive social media tool Huxly; and Sunny Wu, founder and CEO of fashion company LE ORA.

The panelists shared their advice and insights on starting and growing a business as a woman. They all acknowledged feeling pressure to not appear weak among peers, especially as a female founder. But this added weight only causes more stress that may lead to burnout.

“The mental health aspect of being a founder should not be overshadowed,” said Kundra, who realized this during the early stages of building her company with her brother..

Growing up in Silicon Valley, Kundra was surrounded by the startup culture where, “everyone is crushing it!” But she said that no one really opened up about the challenges of starting your own company. .

“Once you grow up as a founder in that environment, it's pretty toxic,” Kundra said. “I felt like I really wanted to be open and be able to go to our investors and tell them about challenges because businesses go up and down, markets go up and down and no company is perfect.”

Honwad, who advocates for women’s rights, emphasized the value of aligning yourself with people with similar values in the tech ecosystem. “[Those people] can make your life better not just from an investment and money standpoint, but also a personal standpoint, because life happens,” she said.

Moore, who unexpectedly lost one of her co-founders at AMP Beauty, said that entrepreneurs “really have to learn how to adapt to [their] circumstances.”

“She was young, healthy, vibrant and we've been sorority sisters and friends over the past decade,” she said about her co-founder Phyllicia Phillips, who passed away in February. “So it was just one of those moments where you have to take a pause.”

Moore said this experience forced her to ask for help, which many founders hesitate to do. She encouraged the audience to try and share their issues out loud with their teams because there are always people who will offer help. When Moore shared her concerns with her investors, they jumped in to support her in ways she didn’t think was possible.

Kundra said that while it is important to have a support group and listen to mentors, it is very important for entrepreneurs to follow their own thinking and pick and choose what they want to implement within their strategy. “At the end of the day, you really have to own your own decisions,” she said.

Kundra also said that while it is easy to turn to your colleagues and competitors and do what they are doing, you shouldn’t always follow them because every business is different.

“When I was in the heat of it, I kind of became [a part of] this echo chamber and that was really challenging for us,” Kundra added, “but we were able to move beyond it and figure out what worked for us [as a company] and we're still on a journey. You're always going to be figuring it out, so just know you're not alone.”

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