Sam Foster
Sam Foster · Economics & Business
Founded Foster Grant (1919) and put affordable sunglasses on the Atlantic City boardwalk in 1929, turning them into an everyday object
22 June 1883, Skala, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now Ukraine)
United States
Sam Foster is recognized among Jewish contributors to Economics & Business — Founded Foster Grant (1919) and put affordable sunglasses on the Atlantic City boardwalk in 1929, turning them into an everyday object
Samuel Foster was born in 1883 in Skala, in Austrian Galicia, to an Ashkenazi Jewish family that reached New York in 1897 — the ancestry is documented in census-based genealogical research. From the comb factories of Leominster, Massachusetts, the plastics capital of its day, he founded Foster Grant in 1919 to make hair accessories, then turned the same injection-moulding machines to a new idea: cheap, good-looking sunglasses, first sold on the Atlantic City boardwalk in 1929.
They made sunglasses an everyday object rather than a curiosity — and decades later, 'Who's behind those Foster Grants?' became one of the century's most famous advertising campaigns.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Genealogy Bargains; Family Tree Magazine; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster_Grant
This page is published in seven languages from an English source. The translations are reviewed, but a mistake can still slip through. If you spot one on this profile — a wrong word, a lost date, a sentence that says something the English does not — please tell us.
Founded Foster Grant (1919) and put affordable sunglasses on the Atlantic City boardwalk in 1929, turning them into an everyday object
Source: Genealogy Bargains; Family Tree Magazine; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster_Grant
