What You Need To Know About Bunny Eyez From Shark Tank

Some of the best "Shark Tank" pitches combine fashion with utility. Perhaps no single accessory captures that combination quite like eyeglasses. Indeed, a number of different eyewear products have been represented on "Shark Tank" over the years, including EyeWris, Pair Eyewear, and ReadeREST. 

Sisters Jenny Hutt and Stacy Fritz hope to score a deal with their eyewear company, Bunny Eyez, when they make their "Shark Tank" debut on November 17. Hutt and Fritz launched their brand in June 2018 to create a more flexible, versatile pair of reading glasses. The design features strategic hinges that let the wearer flip their readers downward without craning their necks, and also allow them to rotate the temples down into opera glasses.

Even after launching Bunny Eyez, Hutt and Fritz discovered new ways that people were using the product. "Along the way, we figured out other things about the product that were really neat," Hutt said on "The Kara Goldin Show." "You could just flip one temple and lie on your side in bed. And then the temple no longer dug into the side of your head." 

She continued, "And then people love that you could just tilt the front of the frame. So like, if you're on a soccer field talking to somebody, you could then look at your phone and make your plans at the same time ... And so there were all these features that were emerging that really we didn't anticipate." The sisters hope that the Sharks see the value in their multi-use readers.

You never know where inspiration will strike. For Jenny Hutt and Stacy Fritz, it was at the hair salon. "After we turned 40, we both needed reading glasses and realized how inconvenient it was to wear them while multitasking and doing our favorite activities," the sisters told Rank & Style. One day, the sisters went to get their hair colored at a salon in Manhattan. They lamented that they couldn't read or look at their phones since wearing reading glasses would obstruct the dyeing process. "This sparked an 'aha' moment," the sisters continued, "and we started googling the kind of reading glasses we wanted to have. They didn't exist. So, we created them."

Early prototypes were rather rough. Hutt broke a pair of glasses and taped on chopsticks in an effort to imagine the product's design. The sisters enlisted the help of a business-savvy partner, Andrea Gluck, who traveled to China in 2017 to visit a production facility. Within four or five weeks, the women had an official prototype, allowing them to further develop Bunny Eyez.

Don't let the rabbit ears in the logo fool you; Bunny Eyez is actually an homage to Jenny Hutt and Stacy Fritz's mother, Bunny Koppelman, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2008. "She was the most amazing mom," Fritz told Yahoo Lifestyle. "She was so loving. She was so caring. She was supersmart." Hutt added, "She was larger than life, and sometimes those are the people you lose too soon."

Appropriately, she was also stylish and had, according to Hutt, "a gazillion pairs of reading glasses in every room in her house." In honor of Bunny, the company donates 20% of all profits of the Anna frame in purple to the Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research.

Naming the company after their mother gives Hutt and Fritz the opportunity to think about Bunny everyday. "We have joy saying her name again," Fritz continued, "and that's really a gift to us." It's also a bonding exercise for the sisters, who say their mother would be proud of their business partnership.

When Jenny Hutt and Stacy Fritz enter the Shark Tank, they will surely boast about Bunny Eyez's extensive list of celebrity customers, which includes Kaley Cuoco, Debra Messing, Tori Spelling, and Kristen Bell. "We didn't anticipate that so many celebrities and that so many people in general would fall in love with the product," Hutt said in the same Yahoo Lifestyle piece.

Kaley Cuoco of "The Big Bang Theory" fame even took to Instagram to endorse the product. "This is not a paid ad," she begins before showing off her multiple pairs of Bunny Eyez glasses. "I just think they're so cute and they're so brilliant." Another crucial customer was Ray J. The singer showed off his twisting, foldable glasses on a 2020 episode of Power 105.1's "The Breakfast Club." Bunny Eyez now sells limited edition Ray J Bunny frames.

The product also found a fan in Hoda Kotb, the co-host of NBC's "Today." Hutt told Kotb about the glasses when she ran into her at the SiriusXM offices, where Hutt hosts the show "Just Jenny." She didn't expect Kotb to endorse the glasses on television. "Two weeks later [she] went on the 'Today' show without telling me and started talking about them," Hutt recalled during her appearance on "The Kara Goldin Show." "So we were wholly unprepared. It was the greatest gift in that we sold out of all of our inventory in a day."