Around 1 billion people don’t have access to eye care and close to 80 percent of the global population’s blindness can be prevented, according to University alumna Jenny Amaraneni, who said these statistics motivated her to want to lower that number.
Amaraneni is the founder and CEO of SOLO Eyewear, a California-based company that crafts sunglasses with a twist.
“SOLO is a line of hybrid bamboo sunglasses,” Amaraneni said. “Our sunglasses are handcrafted using recycled bamboo, and for each pair purchased, we are able to fund eye care for people in need.”
SOLO Eyewear is available across the country, including in three retail locations in Louisiana: Green Serene in New Orleans, Bella Lucca in Slidell and Ruby in Hammond. Amaraneni said she is also looking to expand in Baton Rouge in the near future.
Amaraneni works with nonprofit organizations to deliver eyewear to the less fortunate, and she has so far been able to fund eye care for more than 3,000 people in 19 countries, she said.
Mark Sachs, director at Restoring Vision — a nonprofit organization that works with SOLO — started working with Amaraneni in 2011. Restoring Vision has helped to provide 1.8 million pairs of glasses to more than 600 groups that visit developing countries around the world, he said.
“We are a nonprofit that provides reading glasses and sunglasses to groups going to developing countries,” Sachs said. “So we work with a lot of church groups, a lot of medical groups, student groups that are going to developing countries. We get them to take the reading glasses and the sunglasses with them and then they distribute them to people.”
Sachs said extra glasses courtesy of SOLO are added to shipments when groups go to other countries.
Amaraneni was the vice president of marketing for Pi Sigma Epsilon when she attended the University, and she said the experience has helped her in her endeavors.
“Getting a strong understanding of marketing and event marketing, and also building confidence in the leadership position – those were all key building parts of me getting to where I am today,” she said.
Amaraneni said one of her favorite classes at the University, a franchising class, taught her fundamentals she still uses.
“I loved the franchising class because [professor Robert] Justis brought in Todd Graves from Cane’s and a few other kind of entrepreneur-types to come into our class – it was really inspiring,” she said.
Amaraneni will address entrepreneurship and tell her story as a guest speaker for the University Stephenson Entrepreneurship Institute at 4:45 p.m. April 16 in Room 1420 of the Business Education Complex.
The speech is primarily for students focusing on entrepreneurship at the University, but students from all concentrations can attend, said director of the Stephenson Entrepreneurship Fellows Program Michelle Boullion.
Boullion often encourages alumni to visit the University and speak at the Stephenson Entrepreneurship Institute to share their experiences with students.
“We try to bring graduates back quite a bit, because many of them have been in the entrepreneurship minor just like Jenny and they want to come back and share their experiences, and it’s good because she’s still really young and the students can identify with her,” Boullion said.
