Ic! Berlin Marks 30th Anniversary With Capsule and Campaign Starring Sven Marquardt
- Martino Carrera
- 16 hours ago
- 5 min read
Founded in 1996 in Berlin, the indie eyewear brand is scaling up, looking at new consumer cohorts and markets.
Sven Marquardt starring in the Ic! Berlin 30th anniversary campaign. Tarek Mawad/Courtesy of Ic! Berlin
BERLIN — Inside the two-story headquarters of indie eyewear brand Ic! Berlin here, a portrait of Sven Marquardt, the legendary bouncer at the city’s techno heaven Berghain, hangs on a wall.
Alongside Dalad Kambhu, a Berlin-based Thai American chef awarded a Michelin star, and South Korean dancer Youngchan Moon, among others, Marquardt is one of the faces fronting the brand’s 30th anniversary campaign.
Shot by Tarek Mawad, he is portrayed wearing the brand’s Xenon sunglasses, part of an anniversary capsule collection designed to celebrate three decades of innovation, best epitomized by the company’s signature minimalist frames crafted from cold-rolled stainless-steel with a screwless hinge.
As the story goes, fresh off university and broke in 1996, Ralph Anderl, alongside friends Philipp Haffmans and Harald Gottschling, masterminded the screwless invention, decided to apply it to stainless-steel eyewear and wore some prototype pairs to a gallery event in Berlin. During the night, more than 30 attendees congratulated them on the cool shades they were wearing and, upon hearing the story, placed their personal orders.
Dalad Kambhu starring in the Ic! Berlin 30th anniversary campaign. Tarek Mawad/Courtesy of Ic! Berlin
In 2023, Ic! Berlin was acquired by Italian eyewear powerhouse Marcolin for an undisclosed sum, as reported. Now the brand is fully integrated into VSP Vision, Marchon’s parent company, which purchased Marcolin last year.
“For 30 years, Ic! Berlin has stood for uncompromising design, engineering and innovative premium eyewear made in Berlin. This anniversary honors our proud heritage and sets the stage for a new chapter of global growth, brand storytelling and modern, technical eyewear,” said the brand’s general manager Davide Lunghi, a LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton veteran who joined Ic! Berlin in November 2023.
Over the past 30 years, Ic! Berlin has toyed with more innovations, for example introducing the Silk collection of feather light frames featuring a second-generation, patented, screwless hinge system, as well as materials, such as buffalo horn, acetate, rubber, 3D printing and the patented Flexarbon, crafted from seven-layer carbon achieved via aerospace technology, among others.
The brand has also had its celebrity moments, most notably crafting a pair of oversize aviators for Prince’s 2015 “HitnRun” album cover. Other A-list fans include Alicia Keys, who’s been photographed wearing the Boombox X frames, Madonna and Brad Pitt.
At Ic! Berlin’s premises in the Marzahn neighborhood, where the brand relocated a decade ago from the original headquarters in the Mitte borough, production is vertically integrated and entirely handled in-house, with about 200,000 pair of frames manufactured a year. Any given eyewear piece requires about 50 production steps, from laser cutting of both metal sheets and carbon fiber, to temples and fronts bending, through to grinding, polishing, and coloring. Each pair goes through 15 quality checks across the entire production.
Inside the Ic! Berlin HQs in Berlin. Courtesy of Ic! Berlin
The minimal, at times sci-fi, quality of Ic! Berlin’s sun and prescription frames as well as its in-the-know, niche positioning have gained the brand a cult following.
“Our target client is a ‘technical aesthete,’” Lunghi said in an interview, mentioning high-net-worth professionals with a penchant for minimal, no-logo gear. “I think Ic! Berlin is also benefiting from the appeal of independent eyewear on consumers and the vintage, ‘90s-inspired trend.”
The 30th anniversary campaign, titled “I See Berlin” and centered on the characters shaping the city’s vibrant and raw cultural milieu, offers a new perspective on the brand’s target consumer, he observed.
“There’s a new cohort on the horizon, of the so-called ‘digital adventurers,’” he said. “People like Sven [Marquardt] are the embodiment of a new mindset of making the impossible look possible.”
Thilo Reich starring in the Ic! Berlin 30th anniversary campaign. Tarek Mawad/Courtesy of Ic! Berlin
Other talents include artist Nina Pohl; Berlin-raised but London-based DJ Nunguja Kisalya, and interdisciplinary architect and artist Thilo Reich. Images are flanked by a product-focused digital animation by Leif Podhajsky.
The anniversary collection comprises seven sunglasses, five of which are tweaked reeditions of archival designs. All crafted from stainless-steel with a chrome color treatment, they include teal temple tips and photochromic lenses in the same shade that darken, shifting from light blue to dark green while adapting to sunlight.
“We wanted to have something from the past and decided, of course, to go for the chrome color, which is one of the first colors Ic! Berlin has ever had, and it’s just pretty much a polished, naked steel. It’s the essence, where it all started from,” said head of design Anna Quentin. “We were also very sure that we wanted to have old time bestsellers in there, redesigned in more contemporary versions.”
The “Oli the 2nd” sunglasses part of Ic! Berlin’s 30th anniversary capsule collection. Sebastian Busse/Courtesy of Ic! Berlin
Ic! Berlin is distributed through 3,200 doors internationally. The number of markets — standing at 125 — has almost doubled since the Marcolin acquisition in 2023, with the best-performing ones including Germany, Asia — led by Thailand and Taiwan — as well as North America. Italy is among the top 10 markets as well, Lunghi said.
Ic! Berlin’s most recent push in Southeast Asia has paid off. The brand currently counts two flagships in Bangkok, the most recent opened in 2025, and one in Taipei, in addition to the historical unit on Berlin’s Münzstraße, which is to be revamped in June.
“We’re heavily focusing on China where, since 2025, we’ve stepped on the gas. It’s very underexplored by brands in line with our positioning so we believe there’s an opportunity there. The country’s performance has been growing in the high-double-digit range over the past year and a half,” Lunghi explained.
As for the U.S., Ic! Berlin has been focusing on key coastal locations where it caters to different customer targets, more conservative on the East Coast and slightly more fashion-forward on the West Coast, the executive explained. He sees the integration with VSP Vision fueling the brand’s expansion Stateside and didn’t rule out leveraging the eyewear group’s retail prowess to open an Ic! Berlin’s flagship in the country.
Inside the Ic! Berlin HQs in Berlin. Courtesy of Ic! Berlin
“In Europe we’re really working on brand awareness and equity, but we also see an opportunity to further test retail waters and offer a more comprehensive vision of the brand,” he said. To this end, talks are ongoing in Italy for pop-ups and corners at department stores.
Although VSP Vision doesn’t report financials or break down revenues per brand, Lunghi said that 2026 kicked off on an upbeat note for Ic! Berlin, with double-digit growth in the first quarter of the year.
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