SIOLS founder Beate Gabelt: “I simply invented what I was missing.”
The glasses I never had. So I invented them.
How a personal frustration turned into pioneering work that changed the sports eyewear market forever.
It was somewhere between kilometer 60 and 70 of the Biel 100 km race, in the middle of the night, when my sports glasses fogged up again. Not for the first time. Not for the last. But this time, something shifted.
I wore glasses. I was an ambitious recreational runner. A multi-sport athlete—on skis in winter, on a bike in summer, pushing my body to its limits year-round. I knew the feeling of not seeing properly inside and out. And I knew the market well enough to realize: the problem wasn’t me. The problem was an entire industry that simply hadn’t been paying attention.
Everyone had switched to breathable sportswear.
But when it came to sports glasses, it seemed people had forgotten that you sweat through your eyes, too.
In the late 1990s, I received a commission from Optic Fashion GmbH in Munich. The task: develop new, innovative products for the optical industry. As a glasses wearer, I immediately saw the problem from a different perspective. The question was simple. The answer, revolutionary.
From automotive design, I knew the principle of airflow management. I transferred it to sports eyewear. Together with engineers, we developed an entirely new ventilation technology: ACM—Air Clima Management. No more fogging. No pressure points. No compromises.
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We flipped the process. Not: which glasses look good?
But: what does this person need to truly see well?
The project was so unique that we knew it needed its own name, its own brand. That’s how SZIOLS was born—intentionally unpronounceable, so it would be unforgettable. It worked. Worldwide, to this day.
What followed wasn’t a triumphant market launch. It was pioneering work in the truest sense.
The market reacted hesitantly. The category of sports eyewear simply didn’t exist in people’s minds. Sunglasses were firmly established—as protection and as an accessory. The idea that glasses could be a performance tool in sports was entirely new.
The depth of the problem became most visible in children. School kids who wore glasses were told to take them off so nothing would happen. Half-blind, they jumped over vaulting horses. Quietly excluded. We developed dedicated sports glasses for school use—now as much a part of starting school as the schoolbag itself. A dedicated DIN certification followed. But that was never the goal. It was proof that the problem was real—and that no one else was solving it.
Around 95 percent of movement is guided by the eyes. And yet vision is one of the most neglected senses in sport. That’s what we set out to change. And we did.
In 2021, the SIOLS System and FUSION were awarded the German Design Award and the German Innovation Award—more than 25 years after that first idea, in the middle of the night, somewhere between kilometer 60 and 70.
Once you understand what better vision in sport really means, you never compromise again. That’s what we work for—every single day.
