Back in October, when the 33 Chilean miners emerge from the mine where they have been trapped for 69 days, they are all wearing Oakley sunglasses.  Every journalist covering their emergence comments on it.   Every photo of every rescued miner–and how many impressions is that worldwide?  Billions? Trillions? Chillions?—shows them wearing their Oakleys.  I’ve been following the narrative for a while, and long after the rescue has ended happily, I am still curious how those sunglasses got on those 33 billboards faces for all the world to see.

Three weeks ago, I contact a friend, Kurt Kochman, who used to work at Oakley (he’s now the Web Customer Experience Manager for Skechers) who puts me in touch with an executive at Oakley, who puts me in touch with a PR person from Oakley named Diane, who puts me in touch with journalist in Chile named Jonathan Franklin, who Diane says, “Knows the story better than we do.” Hmm. A non-Oakley person who knows the Oakley story better than Oakley does? This is my kind of branding. No wonder I wear Oakleys.

Jonathan Franklin

The Chilean miners, it turns out, come out of that mine wearing Oakleys because Jonathan Franklin works his way through school in the 1980s by selling sunglasses.  There’s a lot more to it than that, of course, but that is how the thread begins. “I’ve always been a fanatic for sunglasses,” says Franklin when we speak on Skype this week. “When I was in college [at Brown University], I made my living selling sunglasses.  I had a company called All I Wear. We had ten or twelve students covering campuses up and down the East Coast. I’ve also been a street vendor of sunglasses.  Good ones. Vuarnets. Ray Bans. Oakley wasn’t on my radar yet.”

Here is what happens between Jonathan Franklin’s college years and the rescue in Chile that results in the miners wearing Oakleys:

2) Twelve years ago, Franklin moves to Chile where he works as a correspondent for The Guardian. He also freelances all over the Americas for publications like GQ, Esquire and Playboy. He embraces the Chilean culture, loves it there, gets married there, begins raising a family there.

3)  In 2003, five years after the move to Chile, while covering a story in North Carolina for GQ about the World SWAT Championships, meets Erik Poston, a sales rep for Oakley. He and Poston bond over their mutual interest in sunglasses technology. “He took time off from whatever he was doing to talk about the optics in sunglasses,” says Franklin. “Oakleys are great in the deserts or the mountains.”

(We call this mutual interest, or agreement, ‘finding the game.’  It is game that will pay off for its players seven years later.)

4)  When he arrives on the scene of the August mine accident in Copiapo, 800 km east of Santiago where he lives, Franklin is the only print journalist given a ‘rescue pass, which means he has full access to the rescue site, and regular conversations with the miners. His pass designates his job on the rescue site as ‘Writer.’

5) A few weeks after the miners get discovered still alive, Franklin sits in on a meeting at which the subject is the design of the rescue vessel [The Phoenix].  “Talk about improvisation,” he says, “there’s never been anything like this. At one point, they said they’d need sunglasses for the guys. They just kind of skipped right over it, said they’d get safety glasses or something.  They had so many things to think about that they just skipped right over the glasses.  I raised my hand and said, ‘Excuse me, I am only a journalist, and I don’t mean to be butting in, but why don’t you get the guys some Oakleys or some real sunglasses?  And they said we don’t care about that.  And I said how about if I’m in charge of sunglasses?  So they said okay, fine, one less thing for us to worry about, you’re in charge of sunglasses.”

(This is classic ‘yes-anding’ by Franklin.  Yes-anding can move a scene in an unexpectedly productive direction.  It can also, as it does here, transform a trivial detail into something important and valuable.  These little twists are the stuff great stories are made of.)

6) “God knows why, but I had saved the guy from Oakley’s business card. So I write him a letter.   I said I’m a journalist, I’m not going to make a penny off this, but if you get me the glasses, I’ll get them to the miners.”

7) Oakley responds immediately. They ask for specs. The Chilean Navy, which is tending to the miners’ health, sends the specs. Anatomical, so that debris and dirt won’t get in. And dark. 1oo% UV and UVB ratings. Research scientists at Oakley go back and forth with the Navy a few times until they get the best lenses on the most appropriate frames. They ship 35 customized pairs to the Copiapo mine.

The glasses arrive at the last minute. A Navy doctor sends them down the rescue chute. When they come back up, they are on smiling faces surrounded by more smiling faces, and the rest…is eyewear history.

“The Chileans were very grateful,” says Franklin. “The miners, before they were released, were very grateful.  And it was good for everyone.  I know Oakley has gotten criticized for exploiting the situation, but the CEO of Oakley, who sent me the glasses, had totally forgotten about it.  He was watching the rescue on TV, and the first miner pops up and he’s wearing Oakleys, and the CEO says to his wife, ‘How about that, he’s wearing our glasses!’  And the second miner pops up, and he’s wearing Oakleys, and the CEO said, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s right, we sent them some of our glasses!’  He’d totally forgotten about it.”

Lots to be learned from the Oakley Coda:

If you add something productive to every situation you’re in, outcomes take care of themselves.

Subject matter expertise is a good point of connection.

Minor roles in one scene can become major roles in the next scene.

Don’t persuade, participate. The best way to influence the game is by playing it.

Give gifts to your scene partners. Your expertise can be a gift.

Be sensitive to context. If you join a scene in progress, have a good reason why.

Meaningful connections have a long shelf life. This is relevant to network economies, where meaningful connections can be ‘parked’ indefinitely, until a scene calls for them.

Narrative trumps nationality.

Do the good thing in the moment, and the better thing will happen down the line.

Damn, I can’t think of them all! There’s a lot! Find something for yourself in this story and put it in play. Good things will happen as a result. There is a science to serendipity.

You cannot script a story like this. You cannot bake it into your media plan. You cannot buy it, for any price. No one at Oakley could have caused it to happen. If they had tried to achieve the same outcome on their own, it would have come across as rank exploitation. They would’ve never penetrated the inner circle at Copiapo. Instead, they had a conversation. Way back when, they planted a seed. When conditions were right, that seed grew and blossomed into something beautiful, something money could not buy—an incredible narrative.

If you’d like to soak up more of the Chilean miners’ story, you’ll want to pick up the book Jonathan Franklin is writing. It comes out February, 2011.