Our Story

The sunglasses are a prop.

I'll say that plainly, because it's true and because most brands wouldn't.

Good quality props, though. Handcrafted, and I don't use that word loosely: I've stood in the factory in China and watched them assembled by hand. Made to outlast the season you bought them in. Every frame names its own materials on its own page, so you can hold me to it. That part I am exacting about. But the object was never the point — what it represents is.

I love sunglasses. I always have. Fashion is a quiet but loud form of art — it tells you everything about a person before they open their mouth. That's why I chose an object, and why it had to be one that goes on your face.

Before this, I spent close to ten years on a police force. Patrol first, then detective from January 2012. In February 2018 I moved to Pennsylvania and transferred my career to a department small enough that it had no detective bureau — six officers, counting the chief. I was the first Hispanic woman they ever hired. My title went back to Police Officer, and the investigative work came with me; the equipment didn't. They clocked speed with two marks on the pavement and a stopwatch. No radar. Just distance, time, and whoever was holding the watch. I retired that December.

Nearly a decade of looking past what a person shows you to work out what is actually there. I founded Privado in April 2020. It was less of a turn than it sounds.

Your eyes are how you navigate this world. They read a room, a person, a moment. And sometimes they need protecting — not always from the sun, but from the energies that surround us every day.

See, sunglasses are the only thing you can wear that works in both directions at once. You see out. No one sees in.

That's the whole idea. And it's in the name.

Privado is Spanish for private.

Private the way a good pair of frames is private — you're right there in the room and still unreadable. And private the way a mind should be. I don't believe in being restricted to a single niche or idea. Privado came from refusing that.

So our designs are shields and veils at once. They protect your vision and they keep your mystery yours. Maintain your mystery isn't a line I wrote for a campaign. It's the function.

Every frame is named for a species of owl. Bubo. Strix. Tyto. Noctua. Real ones, all of them, including the ones almost nobody has heard of. The owl is the creature that sees what the rest of us can't — in the dark, without noise, without announcing itself.

And that is what sight beyond physicality means. Not a slogan. A practice. Redefining perspective so you can see past the ordinary, past the surface, past the story you inherited about how things are. What you find out there begins with what you find in here.

The frames are how that becomes something you can hold.

You're investing in a message, not a family name.

This is Privado. Thank you for being part of it — this is just the beginning.