The owners of Sunglass Hut, Ray-Ban and other fair-weather accessory brands says SunglassHut.com sales were up 30% or more in the past year.

Italian eyewear manufacturer and retailer Luxottica Group SpA says it’s ready to invest more in infrastructure and marketing to get more aggressive in e-commerce.

Luxottica, whose e-commerce properties include SunglassHut.com, Ray-Ban.com and Oakley.com, says it sold 1.4 million frames online in the last 12 months. Co-CEO Adil Mehboob-Khan, on a call earlier this week discussing Q1 earnings, says the company generated “around $200 million” online in the last 12 months. He said Ray-Ban.com sales grew 100% year over year to $50 million, and SunglassHut.com grew “about 30%, 40%.”

“If we look at that in absolute levels of growth, we should feel quite good because we have models that work and now it’s a question of continuing on the path,” he says. He said e-commerce accounts for about 2% of Luxottica’s total business today. “I think we can do much, much more. So we see that both as something that we know how to do and something that we have to do a lot more of, and that we are going to invest in infrastructure and marketing to get that done.”

A further statement from the company says it intends to transform e-commerce into a “structural growth driver” that will become a relevant part of Luxottica’s revenue in the midterm.

Luxottica last year implemented a full global site redesign of SunglassHut.com to better position itself as an authority in sunglass fashion and put the needs and wants of its primary customer, millennial women, at the center of its strategy. It added two interactive tools meant to help consumers get past a hurdle of buying eyewear online: not being able try them on first.

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SunglassHut.com is one of four finalists for the Redesign of the Year award, as part of the Internet Retailer Excellence Awards. The winner will be announced June 3 at a gala in Chicago during the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition.

Luxottica Group is No. 119 in the Internet Retailer 2015 Top 500 Guide.  

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