#92: TIM PARR of CADDIS AND The Anti-Anti-Aging Movement

On The Inauthenticity of Aging Gracefully

Sometimes the most seemingly counterintuitive idea is actually extremely intuitive. Or maybe it’s just tuitive. Tim Parr had this type of idea when he started CADDIS Eye Appliances. He just didn’t know it right away. That moment came when he had literally five pairs of prototypes for the readers the company would eventually make. A potential investor loved the product, but her reaction to the (in Tim’s mind at the time) throwaway lines written on the boxes about embracing aging sent Tim in a whole new direction. Did she love the brand’s message of being who you are? Not covering crow’s feet in concealer, pretending to be 25 or painting your beard brown. No. The mere suggestion of the “Anti-Anti-Aging” company struck fear in her heart. Tim knew he was onto something.

From that day forth, CADDIS was no longer a company that merely made stylish but relatively affordable reading glasses for aging Gen-Xers reared on irony, Fugazi, and VHS skateboard tapes who still believed that corporate magazines still sucked (but now they had to squint to read them). It became a platform welcoming them (and everyone else) to “The New Age.”

The moment came: We are not in the eyewear business. We are in the business of changing minds.”

Tim, whose background includes working closely with the legendary Yvon Chouinard at Patagonia and founding his own cycling apparel company and was touring as a musician when CADDIS became a gleam in his eye behind the dime-store reading glasses he didn’t like, fused his past lives in creating something at CADDIS that really resonated. At the time, then his mid-late-forties and still touring with his bluegrass band, Tim threw himself into CADDIS as a lifestyle brand with like-minded co-founders like musician Donavon Frankenreiter, pro surfer Lisa Andersen and filmmaker Taylor Steele.

We’ll get to it all in this episode of Nice Work! including the good work Tim and CADDIS is doing in supporting music education through Music Farming and how you can get 10% off on anything on caddislife.com with the code SUPERNICE10. Tim tells us how he got to where he is, what’s next and why age is more than a number.

This might have something to do with Tim’s Challenge to the club (or maybe it is just a Noah Baumbach movie with Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Horowitz (aka the king Ad-Rock) and the late-great Charles Grodin you might enjoy.

Some Things You Might Learn About

>> Why we suck at multi-generational conversations

>> Swapping EQ for IQ and IQ for EQ

>> Why “youth marketing” is for suckers

>> Getting older and owning it

>> How a brand can become a platform for social change

Nice Links

• All things CADDIS at caddislife.com
• MusicFarming.org and its mission to save music education
• The book Let My People Go Surfing

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Top photo of Tim by Danny Clinch | @dannybones64