Oakley CEO Caio Amato: From NASA’s Moon Visor to Brazil’s Piracy Crisis

Oakley’s Caio Amato runs from opposite ends of a spectrum that few brands can hold simultaneously — building visors for astronauts headed to the Moon while fighting knockoff sunglasses that damage eyesight in São Paulo’s favelas. In an extensive interview with O Estado de S. Paulo ahead of his keynote at the São Paulo Innovation Week, the Brazilian global president of Oakley laid out a vision that connects NASA, Meta, Travis Scott, and a public health crisis on the streets of his home country.

Gold on the Moon

Amato, the global president of Oakley and the sports performance hub at parent company EssilorLuxottica, describes the company’s innovation philosophy in three steps: define the problem, find the solution, wrap it in art. The Artemis visor is the purest expression of that sequence. Axiom Space, the company contracted by NASA to build the next-generation lunar spacesuit, approached Oakley to solve a specific problem: in the vacuum of space, unfiltered sunlight hits the human eye at 120°C. Step into shadow and the temperature drops to minus 100°C. Within three minutes of unprotected exposure, an astronaut faces an 85% probability of eye damage including cancer.

Oakley’s internal team — a group Amato calls the “mad scientists” — tested thousands of materials. The one that blocked radiation, extreme heat, and extreme cold most effectively was 24-karat gold. They built a custom vacuum chamber that heats gold powder at the base while the visor rotates at the top, depositing particles uniformly as they rise. The resulting technology, branded Prizm Cosmos, will protect the first humans to walk on the Moon since 1972 when Artemis III launches in 2027. And the same optical filtering principle already powers Oakley’s consumer Prizm lenses — tuned by sport, from golf to mountain biking, selectively suppressing parts of the color spectrum to enhance contrast and visibility.

From Eyewear to Human Amplifier

The second major innovation front is the Meta partnership. Oakley and Ray-Ban — both under the EssilorLuxottica umbrella — launched AI-equipped smart glasses with a Super Bowl campaign that reached 120 million viewers. The glasses include a 4K camera, spatial audio, video recording, and conversational AI activated by voice. Amato frames it in deliberately emotional terms: “These glasses are a human amplifier. You pass from capturing content to capturing life. You’re at a concert, you don’t need to stop watching to record it — you live while you record.”

The idea, Amato said, originated in conversations with athletes including Gabriel Medina: how would it feel to surf with a friend in Australia while standing in Brazil? The São Paulo Innovation Week, running May 13–15 at Pacaembu and FAAP, will feature Amato’s keynote on connecting innovation, vision, and purpose. Oakley describes itself as “open source” — its creative code is co-written by partners who range from Axiom astronauts to rapper Travis Scott, the brand’s chief visionary officer. Amato’s formula for selecting partners weights authenticity at 3x, cultural impact at 2x, and commercial success at 1x. By that metric, Scott’s value lies not in record sales but in his ability to translate emotion into product.

The Piracy Problem

At the other end of the spectrum, Oakley faces a distinctly Brazilian challenge. The Juliet model — discontinued years ago but revived as a cultural symbol of belonging in peripheral communities, partly through the film Mission: Impossible — has become one of the most counterfeited products in Latin America. Amato calls it a public health issue, not merely a brand protection problem. In Oakley’s testing, two laser beams that converge to a single point on a wall diverge when passed through a counterfeit lens — including at the edges. The wearer’s eye compensates constantly for the optical distortion, measurably worsening myopia over time. The fakes offer zero UV protection.

The tension is instructive. The Juliet became popular in favelas precisely because it represents belonging — a desire Amato understands from his own biography. He grew up in Mococa, a small city in the interior of São Paulo state, where a family financial crisis at age five led to childhood obesity and severe bullying. Football transformed his body and his trajectory, and he credits sport with teaching him the empathy that now defines his leadership style. “Everything that gives you energy is a talent,” he tells young Brazilians. “Pay attention to what gives you energy — that’s how you start understanding where your career should go.”

Brazil’s Global Brand Builders

Amato joins a growing cohort of Brazilian executives commanding global brands. David Vélez built Nubank into a 131-million-customer platform now expanding to Abu Dhabi. Embraer has established itself as aviation’s third force behind Airbus and Boeing. WEG, Natura, and Ambev operate across dozens of countries. What distinguishes these cases is not merely the scale of the enterprise but the fact that Brazilian talent is shaping product strategy, brand identity, and innovation pipelines at the highest levels of global corporations — not just occupying regional roles.

Amato’s philosophy — that brands are vehicles for self-expression, not dictators of taste — resonates with a Brazilian cultural instinct that prizes creativity and adaptation. Whether that sensibility can help Oakley navigate a world where AI glasses and lunar visors coexist with counterfeit street markets is the central question of his tenure. For now, the kid from Mococa is sending gold to the Moon.