When asked where she gets her sense of style, Nwamaka Ngoddy answers “…from the school of life. I like things to be fancy and fun.”

Her years in the Philadelphia area while attending graduate school at the Pennsylvania College of Optometry (PCO) at Salus University, she believes, helped her individualize that style.

“The Philadelphia fashion market was a lot more varied than in the South where I grew up,” said Ngoddy, who is originally from Atlanta.

It’s that style awareness that helped Ngoddy expand her professional horizons.

A Series of Bad Fittings

After years of practicing in retail optometry, she opened Anwuli Eyewear in 2019. At its Duluth, Georgia, location, she designs frames specifically with African-American facial features in mind.

After graduating from PCO/Salus and completing an Ocular Disease Residency, Ngoddy began her practice, EyeServe Optometry, in East Point, Georgia.

There, she would try on frames and find that none quite fit her comfortably.

“I have a large African-American demographic, and the more I was in practice, the more I would hear patients with similar complaints: that many of the fashionable frames didn’t fit well,” said Ngoddy.

Common Pain Points

She consulted with opticians to see if there were any major “pain points” they noted when fitting.

What Ngoddy identified was that quite a few African-American patients identified the same shortcomings with available glasses:

1. Frames’ temple lengths were too short
2. Bridge sizes were ill-fitting.
3. Lens sizes were too small and narrow to fit across the entire face

With that product feedback, she decided it was time to develop and create frames with those three features in mind.

Joy

Anwuli Eyewear was the result.

Anwuli is Ngoddy’s middle name; it translates as joy.

She consulted closely with manufacturers, through which she eventually developed a prototype that injected her sense of style and fun into an eyewear line.

Her debut products are branded as the Royal Collection, It features eight different styles of frames in a number of different colors, resulting in a 38-piece set of options.

The frames are available directly to consumers on her Anwuli Eyewear website, which also lists optical locations selling the eyewear across the U.S. (some as close to Montgomery County as Newark and East Orange, New Jersey)

“I decided to figure out how to create frames that made a statement without speaking and that fit well,” said Ngoddy, who still maintains her retail practice.

The feedback so far has been positive. The brand is not only stylish, but it fits properly, according to her customers.

Salus-Rooted Relationships

Augmenting her business success are the relationships she made while she was at PCO/Salus, which helped Ngoddy advance her business.

“The network that I created from PCO has definitely been pivotal in me being able to get into opticals. I have a couple of classmates who have brought the collection into their practices and I’ve also had people refer me,” said Ngoddy, who was involved in the National Optometric Student Association (NOSA) chapter during her time at PCO/Salus.

“So, I’m very grateful for the network I was able to create at PCO. A lot of the faculty and staff were very supportive in that environment.”

Moving forward, Ngoddy is working to develop her business to offer more inclusive styles and sizing.

“We’re also working on getting more optical partners because we believe fitting expertise really helps patients get styles they love,” she said. “We’ve also found that patients really like to try the glasses on.”

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Here’s a video tour of Pennsylvania College of Optometry (PCO) at Salus University.