Glasses direct blog

What do Superman, Harry Potter, and Pokeman all have in common? All titles featured X-ray glasses in them, which are recognised as a figment of comic-book writers and children’s imagination- up till now.

An American company, ‘Advanced Intelligence’ claims to have designed a pair of X ray glasses that allow the user to see, in real-time (and record if needed), ‘…through some type of materials making it possible to see through clothes that in the same condition cannot be seen by the naked eye.’ From this quote and the look of their website, clearly the inventor has a certain rather lurid, and probably illegal, type of use in mind that would never have crossed Harry Potter’s mind.

I suspect that this is a sham load of tosh but we havent tried these glasses and cant vouch for whether they do or dont work. At $2,400 a pop we’re sure you probably won’t take a gamble to find out either. And as for how advanced, Advanced Intelligence’s technology really is, what they’re selling at the moment doesn’t look like the kind of rocket science you’d expect if and when the real deal is invented.

X-ray vision is in the news a lot at the moment. The full body scanners currently being trialled at some airports to enhance security on flights, according to the BBC, ‘work by beaming electromagnetic waves on to passengers while they stand in a booth. A virtual three-dimensional image is then created from the reflected energy.’ They cost about £80,000 each and are developed by Qinetiq.

If you know of any other examples of this kind of technology, or have actually tried a pair of the ‘x-ray glasses’, do let us know what you think below.

Recently featured in Wired magazine, you will need a microscope to see these glasses. This is a 2mm frames sporting a 0.1mm logo, seen here pictured on a house-fly. The logo is the equivalent size of a human hair, and was lazered onto the frames using, from a stationary machine, whilst the frames were moved around using a positioning machine.

Looks as though this was a warm-up act by German company Micreon for their next trick: to engrave tiny lettering onto watch faces. Reminds me of the artist Willard Wigan, who creates sculptures too small for the human eye to see. One of his works that I saw was set on a plinth which was the eye of a needle, and the sculpture itself was of a ship whose ropes were made out of spiders web strands. He gives a fascinating talk here.

We’ll be sticking to the day job of choosing the best styles and designs that suit your eyes and wardrobe, which means you probably won’t find these bug-eyed glasses at Glasses Direct for the foreseeable future

We’re doing something different here at Glasses Direct and it’s always nice to be recognised for it. We’ve been included in the Top 20 of a prestigious awards table that looks at the fastest growing technology companies in the UK.

The Deloitte Technology Fast 50 is based on official financial reports for technology companies over five years. Glasses Direct is in at 19th position with a turnover growth of 2098% over the past 5 years.

This is fantastic news for us and we’re delighted that Glasses Direct has received so much support in a tough economic climate. Consistent value for our customers and new ways to shop (like our home trial service) means that more and more people are choosing to buy from us. More futuristic ideas, such as the video mirror, allow us to keep ahead of competitors and grow during this time of economic uncertainty.

Thanks to all the staff, partners and (most importantly of all), our customers who helped make this happen. Here’s to the next 5 years!

Today is World Sight Day and I want to tell you about a plan I discovered over the Summer and ask for you to consider supporting it.

In West Africa, there is an estimated 2.6m people who are blind. 80% of blind people affected suffer needlessly in developing countries. Their blindness is completely treatable and/or preventable in the first place – sometimes in operations that can take minutes.

Once a person is cured of blindness, they can provide more support to their families, perhaps by returning to work. Everyone benefits, not just the sufferer.

Moorfields, one of the oldest and largest centres for eye health in the world, has committed to developing an integrated eye and surgical training unit that is to be based at the main teaching hospital in Ghana’s capital, Accra. You can see some of the fantastic work they do in the photos on our Flickr page.

This unique facility will enable eye specialists from across West Africa to be trained, in safe and high volume surgery, which is desperately needed to help eliminate cataract blindness or to deliver sight saving treatments for people with glaucoma.

Encouragingly, the hospital has raised about 75% of the £3m it needs already and expects to be in a position to begin construction by the summer of next year, assuming that it is able to raise the remaining 25%.

Please join me in donating to Moorfields’ campaign. This is the first time that we have made a direct appeal to all Glasses Direct customers and with your support we can help ensure the plan takes off.

I am asking everyone to consider giving small amounts that won’t hurt the pocket, but collectively will make a big difference.

You can make a donation using the link below:

http://www.justgiving.com/glassesdirect/

Yours,

Jamie Murray Wells
Founder and Executive Chairman, Glasses Direct

Orbis is a nonprofit organization fighting blindness in developing countries, where 90 percent of the blind reside and yet 80 percent of those 45 million people suffer needlessly because their blindness is curable – often easily and quickly with the right skills and equipment. Once cured, the patient can often return to work, improving the quality of life not just for them but also for their dependents. Orbis fly a refurbished DC-10 jet aircraft, where local doctors, nurses and technicians work alongside an international medical team to exchange knowledge and improve skills, and carry out operations.

Over the last year or so, you might have noticed that selected frames on our site were earmarked as eligeable for a £1 donation to be made, for each purchase, to the charity Orbis. The funds raised from customers through sales of these glasses amounted to £8,610 which we have passed over to Orbis. On behalf of them and us, many thanks!

In September when the plane is due to be at Stansted, I’ve been invited to tour the plane and meet the medical team who will be able to update us on how your funds have been used to support the trachoma eradication programme in southern Ethiopia, a project that hopes to wipe out this particular cause of unnecessary blindness.

Today, I visited Moorfield’s eye hospital, and looked round their new Children’s Eye Centre which is a remarkable and fun place to be – another organisation doing great things related to our field of work.

…you’ll see these posters on our walls.

The first is a poster showing our ‘Guiding Principles’. These principles have evolved over time. As you might expect, these guidelines are mostly concerned with ensuring our customer is at the forefront of our mind at all times and that the company is a fun, rewarding and inspiring place to work for.

Whilst the first poster illustrates the way we like to go about business with each other, the second poster answers the question ‘What is special about Glasses Direct?’ or simply, ‘What do we do?’

There is always more we can do to learn and improve our proposition, and we are constantly learning and developing based on your feedback, but these posters show what we aspire to be. Let us know what you think in the comments below, especially if you think we have missed anything out.

5 years ago to this day, I first registered Prescription Eyewear Ltd, which is the company that trades as Glasses Direct. On our birthday I thought I’d jot down 10 personally memorable points along the way:

• June 2004 – Launched from my bedroom at University of the West of England and expanded into my parent’s house in Gloucestershire.
• August 2004 – Daily Telegraph runs feature on what we were up to, jump-starting public awareness in the business and beginning a history of media interest in the savings at GD compared with the high street.
• March 2005 – World’s first Virtual Mirror launched, named ‘customeyes’, which was immediately featured on Tonight with Trevor Macdonald and we continued to develop over the following years and can now be seen on our product pages.
• November 2005 – Picked up the UK Shell LiveWire Award with Deidre Walker (our first Finance Manager) and my proud Mother in the audience (almost the entire team at that point!). A great stamp of approval from a fantastic organisation and a real testament to the great work the team had done. The business went on to win a number of other business awards, but this one stands out as the first.
• November 2006 – Gordon Brown talks about Glasses Direct as a symbol of UK entrepreneurship success in Enterprise Week speech. We are often asked to contribute and work with researchers for speeches, degree programs, MBA’s, etc and it’s an honour for our business to be used as a role model.
• September 2007 – Oriental themed Glasses Party on the lawn outside our office barn, at Charlton Park to celebrate first VC investment received. I remember signing the final investment documentation with one of my longest standing angel investors and mentors, Ian McCallum on a picnic table outside the tent. The total we have now raised in the company stands at about £16m.
• September 2008 – Management team recruited, including Kevin Cornils ex- CEO buy.at, and MD EMEA match.com and Howard Bryant, ex-CFO of ecommerce success figleaves.com
• March 2009 – With over 35 different designer brands on the site, designer frames now account for a significant proportion of our sales. We started purely own-brand with ambitions to sell every frame a customer could want. Due to our established position in the optical industry and the quality of our team who work with them, this is now looking possible.
• May 2009 – Double whammy: A hugely upgraded Home Trials offering goes live, allowing you to select up to 4 pairs to demo, and have them delivered to your door in a box, before you buy them. AND we glaze our first pair of glasses in-house using robotic machinery from Weco, in Germany
• May 2009 – With over 250,000 pairs of glasses sold, GD continues to pioneer what Marketing Week recently described as etail 3.0 along with a tremendous peer group of other companies breaking new ground in ecommerce.

Apparently 8 out of every 10 businesses fail in the first 5 years – we have done well to beat the statistics but we know we still have a huge amount of growth ahead of us. The journey so far has been a complete thrill and tonight I will be drinking to/with the team that I’ve been lucky enough to work alongside. Long may it continue.

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.

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

Ever since we first made buying spectacles over the web possible, we’ve been searching for innovative ways to let you ‘try before you buy’. Back in 2005 we launched the world’s first virtual mirror on our website. Today, we’ve created something just as revolutionary – our 10-day Home Trial.

This new service is now live and allows you to order up to four pairs of glasses to try on at home or work. Once ordered the glasses are delivered by post in a cool box that opens out into a pop-up stand, enabling you the opportunity to experience and try on glasses anyway, anyhow, anywhere you want. You send the glasses back to us in that same box, freepost, when you’re done.

Whenever I’m in a high street opticians store, I always want to make a shortlist of frames, and then take them home to show people and get their opinion. But you cant do that. I dont expect Dolland and Aitchison would be happy if we just walked out with a handful of frames! Equally, you might get strange looks if you took a suitcase of clothes into your high street optician and tried on 4 pairs of different glasses with different outfits. Now however, you can shop like a celebrity and have the glasses sent directly to you.

We want this service to provide you with a superior shopping experience to the high street.

It costs just £5 to have up to four pairs sent to you at home or work. When you find the glasses that are right for you, pop the box back in the post and we’ll make them up to your prescription. We’ll also reimburse the small fee once you’ve placed an order.

Why not show us your trial specs or your new glasses once you’ve ordered them? You can upload pics to our Flickr group My new glasses!