What We Learned Before Designing KYUNGLAS Dog Goggles

This is the second story in our Development series. If you haven't read the first one, it tells the personal side of how this started: Lime, two pairs of dog goggles, and a cold bike ride. This story is about what we were learning at the company around the same time.

PENGINEER didn't begin by deciding to make dog goggles. We started with dog backpacks.

 

We Started With Backpacks, Not Goggles

Our first product was ABUBA, a dog backpack. As more customers used ABUBA for cycling and other outdoor activities, some of them began asking us whether we sold dog goggles too.

We didn't have goggles of our own, so we started carrying an existing dog-goggle brand. We didn't know much about goggle engineering yet. So we had a lot to learn.

 

 

A Year of Fitting Goggles on Real Dogs

For about a year, we met owners and their dogs and helped fit the goggles ourselves. That year taught us about goggles, but it also taught us about dogs' faces, and about how dogs actually behave when something is strapped onto their heads.

 

Lime wore the goggles too. The summerday when the fur around her eyes was covered in water droplets happened during this period. About a year after we started, we stopped selling that brand.

The Same Problems Kept Coming Up

During fittings, we kept hearing about and seeing the same kinds of problems.

• Some owners told us the straps were difficult to adjust.
• Some said their dogs couldn't get used to wearing the goggles.
• On some dogs, the strap sat close to the mouth. Some owners told us their dogs had trouble opening their mouths comfortably, or eating, while wearing them.
• Some owners saw moisture or fogging inside the goggles.
• Some noticed the foam breaking down and leaving small pieces behind.
• The goggles came off when dogs shook their heads or bodies, or pawed at them.
• Dogs' faces are very different from one another. During fittings, we ran into faces that didn't work well with the strap adjustment we had to work with.

Not every dog had these problems. But the same ones kept coming back, and we began to take them seriously.

What We Noticed About Dogs' Faces

The more dogs we fit, the more we noticed how different their faces are. Some dogs have short muzzles. Some have eyes that stand out. Many faces aren't perfectly the same on the left and right sides, and we met dogs with unusual facial structures, including dogs with one eye.

We also started paying attention to how a dog's mouth and muzzle move, how much of the dog's view a frame covers, and how dogs move when they run, roll, or shake. And we began to wonder about airflow around the lens.

We didn't have answers yet. These were the things we believed a new design would need to think about.

What We Wanted From a New Design

Before we had a design, we had a list. We wanted goggles that could:

• stay secure when a dog shakes
• avoid putting unnecessary pressure around the muzzle
• reduce interference around the mouth
• adjust more flexibly to different facial structures
• avoid blocking more of the dog's peripheral view than necessary
• have a slimmer frame that follows the face more naturally
• allow as much natural airflow as practical
• take optical distortion into account, instead of treating the lens as just a shield

These were goals at the start. We didn't yet know how well we would be able to reach them.

 

 

Looking for a Partner Who Knew Goggles

We realized that knowing dogs wasn't enough. Goggles and eyewear for people have a much longer technical history, with a lot of optical and manufacturing knowledge behind them. We needed a partner who could turn our ideas into a real product.

The search took about two years. We looked at dog-goggle makers, and we also looked at companies that made eyewear and goggles for people.

One company stood out after I came across information about it in a newspaper. I contacted them. They said no. They made goggles for people, not for dogs.

I kept asking. For about a year, I tried to persuade the person in charge. In May 2022, we finally had our first meeting.

They knew goggles. We knew dogs. That was how the collaboration began.

 

 

The First Design Review

Once development began, we explained our ideas and the problems we had seen to the development team. The first design review gave us two related concepts, a full frame and a half frame. They were similar in overall direction.

We chose the half frame. We thought its more open structure would get in the way of the dog's view less.

We Thought Six Months Would Be Enough

At that point, we believed development could be finished in about six months.

Then a request from one customer changed the direction of the project. It was one of the reasons development ended up taking about two and a half years. That is the next story.