ic! berlin: A Screwless Revolution

Thirty years ago, in a freshly reunified Berlin, three friends, Ralph Anderl, Philipp Haffmans, and Harald Gottschling, began questioning the conventions of eyewear. It was 1996, and the city was still in flux: economically uncertain, culturally charged, and creatively restless. Creative communities were taking shape in clubs, studios, and informal workspaces across the city, where a new generation of makers treated experimentation as both necessity and ideology. Berlin wasn’t just rebuilding itself. It was inventing a new language for design and production.

ic! berlin was born out of that moment. From the outset, the brand rejected ornament in favor of precision, embracing industrial materials, radical simplicity, and an uncompromising approach to function. At its center was a seemingly modest idea: a screwless hinge. Technical, minimalistic, and quietly subversive, the concept became both a design philosophy and a defining innovation, one that set ic! berlin apart in an industry that was at the time driven more by aesthetics than engineering.

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