Hawkers spent most of its first decade selling inexpensive sunglasses to young buyers through social media. In November 2021 the Elche brand added a limited capsule of frames made partly from plastic pulled out of the sea.
Hypebeast reported that the collection, called H20, used sustainable plastic and ocean plastic waste across six sunglasses models. So did the packaging. It was built from biodegradable materials, plastic bottles and recyclable paper and cardboard. Alejandro Betancourt López had chaired the company for five years by then.
A Capsule Built Beside a New Factory
Alicante Plaza toured the company’s new frame plant in Elche that same month. Production there had started in February 2021. Frames left the plant exactly as they came out of the mold, the paper reported, with no lacquer coat added afterward. Only the lenses still came from Asia.
Glasses made in Elche carried the same price tags as the imported range. Alejandro Betancourt López’s company had crossed the 600-employee mark that September, the paper reported. Claudio Scagni ran the factory. Making glasses in Spain did not have to mean charging more for them, he said.
Alejandro Betancourt López on Responsibility as Standard Practice
Product lines like H20 fit a view he laid out in a 2023 interview. Social responsibility, he said, now sits inside every business plan he sees. “It’s something of the DNA of corporate world today,” Alejandro Betancourt said.
When a company presents a launch, he said, responsibility is “a given,” whether it shows up as a share of proceeds, a foundation’s involvement or the materials in the product itself. Customers now demand it of the companies they buy from, he added. “It’s part of the way of doing business today,” he said.
“One thing is charity, then it’s renewables and responsibility with the climate change. So it’s so different,” he said of how the idea has widened.
Hawkers runs its own version of the charity side. “In Hawkers, for example, we do programs for eyewear and solutions for that access to eyewear for people that have no access to it,” he said in a separate interview.
Alicante Plaza’s May 2024 profile described a company on course for roughly €65 million in sales that was also stepping up its sustainability work. Capacity at the Elche plant could reach 120,000 frames a month across three shifts, the paper reported, and Alejandro Betancourt López’s group still runs that plant from the city where the brand began.