Future Looks Bright Through Lens-Less Nooloos Glasses for Bloomfield Hills Siblings

Three Bloomfield Hills siblings aren’t letting their youth stand in the way of marketing a line of fashion eyewear available at Claire’s stores, a specialty fashion retailer found in malls across America.

In just seven months, the Hosler siblings – Sophia, 7; Melia, 8; and Christian, 10 – went from concept with their Nooloos glasses to a deal with Claire’s, DBusiness reports. The Detroit business journal was so impressed with the kids’ entrepreneurship that they were named the magazine’s “Young CEOs of the Year.”

It started purposelessly.

Melia and Sophia popped the lenses out of a couple of pair of 3-D glasses they’d gotten at a movie and festooned them with stick-on jewels and beads.“We thought we made them beautiful and began to wear them everywhere we went, even school,” Melia told DBusiness.

“Soon, everyone was asking us, ‘Where did you get those?’ and ‘Where can we get a pair?’ ” she said. “So we told our mom, and we decided we could make some money selling them to other children.”

Christian, a fourth-grader and the math whiz in the family, put a calculator to the whole thing and determined the glasses could be sold for $5 each. Before long, they had made a tidy profit of $400 by selling the glasses, along with lemonade, in front of their family home and at the Birmingham Farmers Market.

They even made a pitch for Nooloos, a name derived by combining their nicknames, to appear on the“Shark Tank” reality television show that matches entrepreneur contestants with investors.

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By mid-May, they had received sealed the deal with Claire’s, which targets young women, teens, tweens and kids with their fashion accessories. They began working with a company in China, and turned out 18,000 pairs of the glasses, which are available at $10.50 a pop. The lens-less glasses are available in four colors, and include packet of adhesive beads, stickers and baubles is included so the buyer can tailor them to fit her whims.

The initial 18,000-pair order from Claire’s is just a fraction of what they hope to achieve for their business. Christian, speaking with the Birmingham Eccentric, they’re aiming to sell 100,000 or more pair.

“I hope this goes good and we’re in a lot of stores and we can be millionaires,” Melia told DBusiness of her aspirations for the startup enterprise. “Then we can get a pool.”

“Don’t forget,” Sophia said, adding a “hot tub – and another puppy” are on the wish list.

Their success is also the success of the Bloomfield Hills School Foundation, where the kids are donating 15 percent of their profits. Christian attends Bloomfield Hills Middle School and his sisters go to Way Elementary School in Bloomfield Township.

“As a parent, I think it’s so important to teach the kids to give back,” their mom, Lenna Hosler, told the Birmingham Eccentric. “They learned this at such an early age.”

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Video and screenshot: YouTube and nooloos.com, respectively.