A smart solution for cleaning eyeware

Anyone who wears glasses knows how annoying it can be when they become smudged or dirty. The merest smear or fingerprint is all it takes to impair the wearer’s vision – with potential consequences ranging from fatigue to accidents. Most people wipe their lenses on a cloth – or their shirt-tail and rarely properly clean the frame. The results are not often brilliant – and not often hygienic, either. Cliris SA, a Swiss-based technology company, has now launched a groundbreaking new high-tech product, also called Cliris, which makes all this a thing of the past.

Cliris consists of a beautifully designed pod, within which a pair of glasses are set to be cleaned, and a replaceable cartridge containing Cliriense, the company’s specially developed cleaning solution. Within the pod are two high-tech cleaning modules that work in parallel. The first takes a carefully dosed amount of Cliriense from the cartridge and sprays it on the glasses in a fine mist. Cliriense is a patented combination of chemicals that gently dissolves the microscopically small bits of dust and make-up, the smears of oil, perspiration or facial cream, sunscreen, and all the other particles of dirt and grime that end up on the lenses and frame. Then Cliris generates focused ultrasound waves which cause the residue to simply fall away – in effect, drying the glasses, but without heat.

The process takes under four minutes, and the results are sparkling clean and clear lenses, as if they had been washed by thousands of tiny micro scrubbing brushes. But not only have the glasses been cleaned and dried. They have also been sanitized and treated with a fragrant anti-fog mist. They emerge from the Cliris pod like new. Quick, completely automated, and fully antiseptic – Cliris is also safe for the environment, as the Cliriense cleaning solution is 100% biodegradable.

To bring this innovative new product to the market, Cliris SA chose to launch it via Kickstarter in the USA. “We are very excited about the prospects of raising development capital through Kickstarter,” says Didier Lutz, the company’s CEO. “Kickstarter is a widely respected platform for innovations like Cliris. It allows us to present our unique concept to thousands of potential backers. By convincing just a few of them to provide some seed funds, we will be able to go into serial production.”

The strategy for Cliris includes not only online sales directly to individuals who wear glasses, but also sales through opticians’ practices. “In Europe, over half the population wears glasses – and practically everyone owns a pair of sunglasses,” says Martial Mathieu, COO. “The potential market is very big.”

Cliris SA, the company behind the products Cliris and Cliriense, is a Swiss high-tech start-up established in May 2013 in the Technopole Y-Parc in the city of Yverdon-les-Bains in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Its founder, Didier Lutz, is a technology specialist-entrepreneur and winner of the “Prix d’Excellence Entreprendre Region Lausanne”, an award for entrepreneurial excellence in Switzerland.

Together with a specialist in high-tech development and another in marketing, he has brought Cliris SA to the point where it is ready to move from the concept and design phase to production and market introduction. To accomplish this, the company’s management team decided to benefit from the Kickstarter platform. With feedback received from backers worldwide, and based on pre-orders of Cliris pods and Cliriense cartridges, the company will secure the financing needed to finalize development and go into production.