Seeing the world better, with Pala

pala sunglasses

Pala are a fellow B Corp based out of Brighton, producing beautiful sunglasses for a good cause. John Pritchard founded Pala with the intention of funding eye-care projects across Africa, having experienced first hand the lack of access to spectacles or corrective procedures in African nations.

According to the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB), Africa has 73% more blind and visually impaired people than any other region in the world. This lack of access to eye-care perpetuates poverty because sufferers struggle to read and access the sort of education and work that can lift them out of poverty. Pala donates a portion of proceeds from each pair of glasses sold to Vision Aid Overseas as grants for vision centres, dispensaries, and screening and training programmes, and to date more than 11,000 sight-impaired people have had their lives positively changed thanks to receiving a pair of prescription glasses or corrective surgery.

“Our eyewear is designed for those who acknowledge the need for a better future, appreciate the world we live in and embrace the adventure of exploring it.”
John Pritchard – founder of Pala Eyewear

Leap’s founder Matt Hocking recently joined Pala as a non-executive director, and assisted them on their journey to B Corp certification. We then recently worked with them to redevelop their website. Our brief was to rebuild the Pala Eyewear website from scratch to be lighter, more carbon-efficient and easier for their team to use and update – all whilst maintaining the overall design aesthetic.

“The old site used to produce around 2.8grams of C02 per page view, whereas this new one produces 0.63grams per page view (and even less when cached on your machine). This has reduced the carbon intensity of the site by more than 126% (based on the homepage, one of the heavier pages).
The site is now much faster, too – overall about 1.5-2 seconds faster per page load. This doesn’t sound like much, but makes a huge difference, especially on mobile.”
– Nick Lewis, senior sustainable web developer

Interested to find out how we can reduce the carbon footprint of your online presence through our planet-first web design and development, or our renewable-powered carbon neutral hosting? Get in touch, we’d love to hear from you!