Businesses, nowadays, are so fixated on “the future.” Tesla wants cybertrucks driving around Mars. Impossible wants everyone to eat soy made from petri dishes in a lab. WeWork wants you to find “community” at the office.But as of March 2025, none of these visions have come to life. Tesla is stepping away from their outer space-branding, and now markets to buyers in rural America. Meat consumption has not fallen significantly. And the soul-crushing solitude of remote work is here to stay.For most companies, “the future” is an abstract destination that never arrives. But for Hankook Kim and his globe-spanning eyewear brand Gentle Monster, the future can be created here and now.Prior to Gentle Monster’s inception, the eyewear market was dominated by Luxottica, an Italian corporation that owned major brands like Ray-Ban, Oakley, and Persol, and had licensing agreements with luxury labels like Chanel, Prada, and Versace.It was an arrangement that gave Luxottica significant control over pricing and distribution. Despite its veneer of free market competition, the market for eyewear operated almost like a monopoly. And naturally, with mostly European brands dominating the space, art direction often sold you images of Western exceptionalism. In the case of Ray-Ban, ads depict sharp-jawed shirtless men driving a sports car over a European summer. Products are strategically inserted in Top Gun scenes, as patriotic air force pilots decimate some faceless foreign terrorists. And one recent collaboration with Meta sells you the life of a sophisticated actor/art-curator hybrid in Hollywood.But from trying Ray-Ban and Oakley pairs myself, I learned that the frames often didn’t suit my Asian face. And neither did the fantasies they were selling.So when Gentle Monster first launched, it positioned itself as something different. Back then, Asian consumers had an unmet desire for ultra-oversized eyewear (something their Western counterparts never asked for). Kim told Business of Fashio