A Different Perspective: Selena Morris on alt*ego

Selena Morris did not set out to build an eyewear brand. Coming from a background in commercial property, she spotted a gap in the market through her own experience: technical eyewear could deliver performance, but too often lacked personality. She founded alt*ego to challenge that trade-off, creating a British luxury performance eyewear brand designed to combine technical function with glamour and self-expression. In this Entrepreneur UK interview, Morris discusses the opportunity beyond ski eyewear, early partnerships with Swarovski and Harrods, balancing entrepreneurship with her property portfolio, and her ambition to build an internationally recognised brand without losing its independent spirit.

You came from commercial property rather than fashion or eyewear – what made you take the leap and build alt*ego?
It was not a conventional or planned career move, but alt*ego came from a personal frustration. Sport has always been a huge part of my life, and I found that when I was buying technical eyewear, particularly for skiing, I had to choose between performance and personality. There were plenty of technically excellent products in the eyewear category, but very little that felt expressive, glamorous or genuinely exciting to wear. My background in commercial property development actually gave me the confidence to look at that differently. I had spent years assessing opportunities, understanding markets, negotiating and delivering projects that looked beautiful but also functionally designed for their purpose – so rather than simply accepting that this was how the category looked, I started asking whether there was room to do something different. alt*ego began with a very simple idea: performance first, but never at the expense of expression. I did not come from the eyewear industry, which made the learning curve incredibly steep, but I also think being an outsider allowed me to question some of its conventions.

You spotted a gap between performance and personality in ski eyewear. How big do you think that opportunity actually is?
Much bigger than ski. Ski was where I saw the gap most clearly and it gave us a very distinctive entry point, but the underlying consumer is not defined by one sport. We are seeing a broader convergence between performance, fashion, travel and lifestyle. People invest in beautiful technical clothing and equipment and increasingly expect their eyewear to perform in the same way while still saying something about who they are. That is why alt*ego has already moved naturally from the mountains into sunglasses and cycling. I see the opportunity as building a premium performance eyewear brand with a very distinctive point of view, rather than simply building a ski-goggle company.

You’ve secured some impressive luxury partnerships relatively early – including Swarovski and distribution through Harrods. What do those partnerships tell you about where the brand can go?
For a young independent brand, those early validations have been incredibly important. Becoming a Swarovski Ingredient Branding Partner was particularly significant because our original HALO collection was built around the idea that genuine technical performance and glamour could coexist. Having alt*ego represented within Harrods through MyWardrobe HQ has given us another form of validation: that the product can sit comfortably in a luxury environment alongside much more established names. But I do not see luxury as simply being about where a product is sold. For us it is about product, experience and positioning. Whether somebody discovers alt*ego in London, Courchevel, Ibiza or an airport, I want the brand to feel unexpected, desirable and recognisably ours. Those early partnerships have given me confidence that there is an appetite for that.

You’ve built the business while continuing to manage your property portfolio. What have you learned about scaling a business while managing competing demands?
That you cannot scale by trying to do everything yourself – although I have certainly tried! Building alt*ego alongside managing my property interests has forced me to become very disciplined about where I add value. In the early stages of a business you inevitably wear every hat, but there comes a point when being involved in everything actually becomes a constraint on growth. I have learned to build a network of people who are better than me in their specialist areas, while being very clear about the things I should not delegate: the vision, the relationships and the instinct for where the brand should go next. It has also made me extremely conscious of cash and risk. Property taught me to think commercially and long term; building a consumer brand has taught me that sometimes you also have to move quickly, trust your instinct and create the opportunity rather than wait for it to appear.

If we spoke again in three years, what would you want alt*ego to have achieved that would make you say, ‘we really built something here’?
I would want alt*ego to be recognised internationally as a performance eyewear brand with a point of view – one that people can identify before they even see the logo. Commercially, that means meaningful international distribution across the right luxury, resort and travel-retail environments, a strong direct-to-consumer business, and a community that genuinely identifies with what alt*ego represents. But scale alone would not make me feel that we had succeeded. I want us to retain the irreverence and independence that made me start the business in the first place. If in three years we have built a commercially significant global brand without sanding off all the things that make alt*ego different, that would feel like we had really built something.