How to Start an Eyewear Business with AZYR Specs

in convo with the grande dame of vintage eyewear about starting a business that downtown denizens flock to. And Eli Manning.

Maureen Ryza is a sunglasses pundit. She’s the Rachel Maddow of vintage eyewear with, like, X-ray vision, but instead of seeing bones and the gum you swallowed in middle school, she can see the make, model, selling and market price of your shades.

Before starting AZYR Specs (the palendrome of Ryza), her career zigzagged wildly. After studying Sports Broadcast Journalism in Missouri, she up and moved to New York to work as a stylist on projects for folks like Kid Super and Eli Manning, then to costume design on Law & Order, to bartending at Bowery Ballroom, at one point she was living on a cruise somewhere in the Caribbean. A night out with her has similar qualities. An innocent dinner date will ends with us thumping a kebero on a stage in Flatbush.

Two years ago she asked me if I’d do a test shoot wearing glasses she had remodeled. She’d quit her waitressing job, where we worked together, and was starting a vintage sunglasses company. At the time, starting a business seemed to me like…