Glasses direct blog

The sun is still shining out here at our Swindon office, so I’ll make no apologies for posting my second hot tip for sunglasses this season! You can never beat a good pair of aviator shades and our Cowboy specs look pretty sexy as sunglasses. These ones have a graduated brown sunglasses tint added to them and Adam from our IT team is kindly modelling them for us!

Some of our glasses have recently appeared in an advert for Dulux paint.

The lady wears a pair from our Scandinavian range and the gent steams up a pair of Mai Tai

It’s been a wonderful sunny week here in London and everyone’s been clamouring for some sunglasses to wear outside at lunchtime. Luckily we had a selection here that were used in our our catalogue photo shoot earlier this week. But before I show you the one’s that everyone else got to wear, I thought i’d show you my favourites.

These are my Frankie glasses with a graduated brown sunglasses tint. You can have them made up with or without a prescription, so if you don’t need glasses yet (like me) then you can get a pretty unique pair of sunglasses and if you do need prescription glasses then you can get a trendy pair of sun specs that you can see through!

They’re a bit “Paris Hilton” but big and bright are THE thing this summer so these are my hot tip for this season!

More sunglasses in the days to come…

We’ve got some news I’ve been wanting to share for a while that we’re hugely excited to announce. In what some people describe as the toughest economic times since World War II, Glasses Direct has secured £10m in working capital funding which we will be using to expand our business. With the world class management team that we’ve built and this further capital we’ve brought in, we’re all set on our way to becoming a household brand, something that was one of my founding visions.

The new funding is from an international group of investors. Our newest investor is Munich based Acton Capital Partners, joined by existing investors Index Ventures of London/Geneva and Boston based Highland Capital Partners who have both reinvested in our business along with some of the early investors making a contribution to the round, including my own family.

We’ll be using the money to invest in our roots. For the first three months this year in the UK we’ve seen our best performance ever for the company. We’ve shipped tens of thousands of pairs of glasses to our UK customers; we’ve launched new ranges; new ways of buying and trialing our glasses; and we’re looking at ways of innovating in online commerce across the board. As well as reaching new customers internationally we’re also going to be using our new funding as capital to expand our UK business.

Thanks to the whole of the team here at Glasses Direct too. We’ve been a family since we started five years ago in Wiltshire.

The Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion (QAEP) celebrates and recognises the activities of individuals who have played an outstanding and significant role in promoting enterprise skills and attitudes to others in the UK.

Jamie Murray Wells, Glasses Direct’s founder, has been recognised for his great vision and expertise and will be decorated with the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion at the age of 26, making him the youngest ever recipient of this coveted award.

In 2004 Jamie Murray Wells started Glasses Direct from his parent’s sitting room at the age of 21, and his business has now become the world’s largest online retailer of prescription glasses shipping a pair every few minutes around the clock, with sales now over 250,000 pairs, and saving the UK public in excess of an estimated £30 million on their prescription glasses.

How does Jamie promote enterprise? Even though he has headed up the company on a fulltime basis for four and a half years throughout this period of intense growth, Jamie has also found the time to help other people make it in business, using the experience he has had bringing his business from the bedroom to the boardroom. Enterprise Promotion to students, budding businessmen, FTSE 100 executives, underpriviledged, SME’s, schools, universities, and cabinet politicians alike has been a top priority throughout his journey so far, where other entrepreneurs might have focused single-mindedly on their business instead.

Despite founding and driving his company to a position where it is now the world’s largest online retailer of prescription glasses, Jamie Murray Wells has dedicated significant amount of his time and energies to helping UK PLC by make enterprise promotion a top priority, at such an early part of his career, relative to other enterprise promoters. His commitment to helping young entrepreneurs covers a wide variety of bases and comes in many different guises, including judging for awards programmes, mentoring, speaking engagements, writing in newspapers and magazines, advisory roles to Government level, and investment in new and emerging young entrepreneurs.

The Prime Minister Gordon Brown recommended to the Queen last month that Jamie be presented with the QAEP award. Jamie will be presented with an Engraved chalice and Grant of Appointment at a reception hosted by Her Majesty the Queen at Buckingham Palace on July 13th. Jamie is one of the youngest ever people to be on the list of Queen’s Birthday Awards announced today, on the Queen’s birthday, in the London Gazette. This makes him holder of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion.

And the winner is……

On January 27th we launched a competition to design our new cleaning cloth. Our microfibre cloths go out free with all our glasses and needed an overhaul. You can see the old cloth design, my own entry, and the launch blog post here
The competition ran throughout February, leaving us with the difficult task of judging which should get the ultimate acolade of the cleaning cloth world
On March 12th, we showed everyone a selection of the entries here

Well my dotty design idea didnt win, but I am now pleased to announce that Mr. Glen McNeill produced the inspirational design for the above creative, which is now being turned into thousands of cloths ready to go out with your glasses. You can click on the image above to see an enlarged version. Mr. McNeill won a new pair of glasses (and a lifetime’s supply of cloths!) and said he was ‘ecstatic’. Congratulations!

Thank you to everyone who entered. We will re-run the competition in early 2010 to find next year’s winner so please enter again then

As avid followers of glasses in all shapes and sizes, we watched with excitement as the nation donned its 3D spectacles for last week’s live, landmark 3D broadcast by Keane. Now that 3D broadcasts on TV and online are becoming more regular, we all have the opportunity to don our 3D glasses more often.

And so to help you track down where to get your hands on 3D glasses, and to see what’s coming up to watch in 3D, we thought we’d research what’s happening where.

Top 5 places to get your 3D specs

1. This US mail order site gives them way for free is you send a self-addressed envelope
2. 3DImages.co.uk boasts a stock of 350,000 3D specs, from card to plastic models
3. Napier University is running a science project that’s giving away 3D glasses to people based in Scotland
4. Keane has a cut-out template for making your own 3D glasses
5. If you have a £3000 Hyundai S465D TV and Sky+HD you won’t need specs at all. That’s the future of 3D viewing in your living room.

What to watch in 3D

• The 3D Keane gig is available to watch on the Keane band website
• Aliens versus Monsters is currently playing in cinemas in 3D
• Horror fans can get ready for My Bloody Valentine 3D appearing on DVD this June
• There’s more 3D viewing on the way from Sky, who also say the Olympics in 2012 is going to be a major 3D showcase.

If you want to get the 3D look in real glasses, we’ve got a few pairs in our Cocktail collection that have the thick frames and striking looks that you’ll want.

What are your favourite 3D films or TV programmes? Let us know in the comments below…

Ever since we launched our 10-day Home Trial program last week, our fulfillment team have been heroically picking and packing thousands of glasses to ship out to customers. So today our Founder, Jamie Murray Wells and our CEO Kevin Cornils spent the morning working in our fulfillment department. They had a great time seeing what glasses customers had been choosing.

All sorts of things happen to a pair of glasses before we let them out the door to our customers. We have a great quality control team who check each frame several times throughout the order process. They will also check all lenses when they come back from being glazed to ensure all prescriptions are correct and there are no lens defects.

The fulfillment team are the people making sure the right glasses are picked and packed and ensuring all orders get sent out as quickly as possible. They really are a neat and efficient operation in our Swindon warehouse, you certainly can’t stand still too long if you go in there!

We’ve set up a flickr group for people to post pictures of themselves in their new specs – or to get second opinions on their Home Trials.
There’s also a question ‘How many pairs of glasses do you own’

I thought I’d list mine here.

I’m pretty obsessive about glasses, and I have a lot of pairs. What I find is that, just like my wardrobe, there’s a core set that I wear often, and a bunch of others that get occasional outings.

Different pairs definitely have different feelings
- my rimless pair were sensible and neutral, and vaguely stylish they go with anything. They were my default pair that get the most public time – unfortunately they were lost over the side of a canoe in wales.

- my bold plastic pair are cooler than the rest, but slightly pretentious. I’m totally gutted that they’ve broken, as they were my day-to-day pair.

- My Second pair of bold plastics are also cool, and very comfortable. For some reason I feel safe in them. Madrid glasses from Glasses Direct for £29

- super bold plastic pair with blue lenses are overtly ‘fashionable’ and I need to be in a very confident mood to wear them.

- my yellow aviators are great fun – I feel oddly rock’n'roll when wearing them. Very Hunter S. Thompson
Unfortunately I’ve lost these somewhere, but they looked a bit like these:

- my red plastic ones – are slightly too much for my wife to bear, but look great with the right togs on. The darker colours are better for these though I think. Kamikaze glasses from Glasses Direct.

- my plain plastic ones fall off too much, so I’ve never really worn them

- my swimmers are great for…erm…swimming. so much better than contacts in the pool, which always end up falling out and stinging afterwards from the chlorine.

- my graduated tint aviator sunnies – are fantastic. Simply fantastic, and i wear them whenever it’s sunny. Personally I think they’re cooler than most people’s branded sunnies. They’re Ray with grey graduated tint lenses.

- my wirey ted baker specs – I can’t wear these for very long as the lenses are massive and I foolishly didn’t go for thin lenses so they dig into my nose.

- my wireless bendable specs – were bought from vision express as part of a competitor shop. They’re good everyday specs, but we sell the same type of glasses for about £150 less. Our version Malaga bendable rimless are currently out of stock.

- these are just stupid, I bought them on a whim as they’re so incredibly huge and I have yet to put lenses in them. As they’re SO massive I’ll have to get extremely thin lenses put into them otherwise they’ll be too heavy on my nose.

- My Bolle bold specs were a bargain from our own site (not in stock at the moment). I wear these most days.

- My most expensive pair are a lovely pair of glasses by a company called ‘Mykita’ which I bought from a wonderful little opticians in Brighton. I can’t afford to buy too many pairs like this, but I couldn’t resist.

So there you have it – my current range of 14 pairs of prescription glasses
3 pairs from high street chains
4 pairs from Glasses Direct
1 pair from an independent optician
2 pairs bought online, then glazed by Glasses Direct
3 pairs bought from competitors online
1 pair bought from a sports shop! (The goggles)
- Oh and a small batch of daily contact lenses that I occasionally wear.

What about you?