Glasses direct blog

Great news if you’re due a new eye test! Tesco Opticians are offering a FREE eye test at any of its opticians across England and Wales.

To qualify for the free test, all you need to do is pick up your free Tesco magazine at any Tesco store and cut out the voucher you’ll find on the first page. Book your appointment by calling 0845 301 3479, and take the voucher with you when you go for your test.

Once you’ve had your eyes tested, simply ask the optician for your prescription and PD measurement and you’re then free to purchase your new glasses from wherever you choose!
Kudos to Money Saving Expert for pointing out this offer.

Click on the following link for information on understanding your prescription and PD measurement. If you still have any questions on how to enter your prescription when ordering on our website, please don’t hesitate to call our team of qualified opticians on 08456 88 20 20, we’ll be happy to help.

Congratulatons to Nick Blatcher for being our second free glasses for life winner.

When we contacted him he had this to say:

“Thanks a lot, I have only ever won a box of Matchmakers at the school fete before, so this is brilliant.”

We’re so happy that we can bring this kind of joy to people and very much look forward to giving even more free glasses for life away over the next few weeks.

There’s two more weeks left to run in the free glasses for life competition which is drawn at noon every Wednesday, so if you want to win you need to enter the draw which you can do here

Don’t forget you can increase your chance of winning if you refer all of your glasses wearing friends … if they win, you win!!

After a week of running the free glasses for life campaign and seeing a mass influx of entrants we held the first draw yesterday to pick the lucky winner.

We decided it was only fair and right that our prestigious leader Jamie Murray Wells should be the one to pick the winner so we set up the data and got him to press the “big red button” national lottery style with a fanfare but without the lights!!

The winner was picked and within 30 minutes Chris Simpson the Head of Marketing was on the phone to him and I don’t know who was more excited Chris or the lucky winner. Chris was extremely happy to be the bearer of this fantastic news, and why not, it’s not everyday you get to give someone something FREE for the rest of their life.

So to get to the point the first free glasses for life winner was Mr Seljeflot from London who was referred from our friends at 50Connect so congratulations to him from all of the Glasses Direct team, he was extremely happy as you can see from this quote

“I’m blown away by this – brilliant news.”

There’s three more weeks left to run in the free glasses for life competition which is drawn at noon every Wednesday, so if you want to win you need to enter the draw which you can do here

Don’t forget you can increase your chance of winning if you refer all of your glasses wearing friends … if they win, you win!!

Free glasses for life I hear you say? That’s right, you heard correctly – you may never have to pay for prescription glasses ever again.

Glasses Direct introduce Free Glasses for Life, a prize draw where up to 8 lucky winners will win a new pair of glasses every year for the rest of their lives. Winners can choose any style from our own-brand range once a year and we’ll expertly make them up to their prescription with their choice of lenses and coatings – a saving of thousands of pounds!

More about the draw…

We are the UK’s largest internet prescription glasses retailer. Until we started causing a stir in a stuffy industry in 2004, buying prescription glasses was expensive – up to £400 for designer spectacles. Not anymore. Through us, you can buy the frames and lenses you’ll find on the high street, but from £19. Which means you can now afford to have fun with your glasses, buying your favourites in several colours, and different styles for different occasions.

We came up with the Free Glasses for Life idea to get people thinking about how much they spend on glasses, and how much they can potentially save, even if they don’t win. Every entrant will qualify for an immediate 10% saving off our already low prices.

How do we do it?

Because we don’t have to pay for middlemen, stores, or the expensive machinery needed to offer eye tests, we save our customers a small fortune. We use the same frames, lenses and laboratories that the big opticians do, and our all our dispensing opticians are registered with the General Optical Council, so quality is guaranteed. You just pay less, and have more choice. A win/win situation if ever we laid eyes on one! We even offer a 30 day no-quibble money back guarantee.

Multiply your chances by five or ten times…

There’s a chance to make one of your friends very happy. You can register friends for the draw too and if one of them wins, you will both win Free Glasses for life so the more friends you add, the more chances you have of winning!

You will be given the option to do this after you enter your email address into the draw, we will send them an email about the draw on your behalf – they will not be added into the draw without their approval so don’t have to worry about us spamming them.

So go ahead and enter the draw by going to the Free Glasses for Life site now and you never know your luck, don’t forget to tell all your friends that wear glasses too – it’s a chance in a lifetime offer.

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.

Jamie’s monthly slot on Sky News brought up some more interesting and wacky stories found in the news right now including a bomb proof man, E.T. being discovered by Google Street View, a meat face off tournament and an April fools computer virus that will doom the world god help us all, you can watch the full video below.

Everybody Needs A Mentor

Are you looking to start a business but don’t know where to start? Don’t worry, help is at hand, the Times are now giving you the opportunity to be mentored by one of five experts at the top of their fields, one of those mentors being our very own Jamie Murray-Wells. Each mentor is giving away their time for free for at least one hour a month for a whole twelve months which is an amazing opportunity for five lucky people.

If you’re feeling inspired but need that extra nudge in the right direction then read Jamie’s story and see that you are in for a lot of hard work, ups and downs but with the right mentors behind you, you can and will be successful just like him.

Starting up a business: Jamie Murray-Wells, 25, CEO and founder of Glasses Direct

I caught the bug for my own business as a student of English at the University of the West of England. I was always looking for opportunities. Glasses was my third idea. I’d researched a gambling model and property but, while ideas kept coming, I knew that I couldn’t afford to get too sentimental. So when they didn’t work, I ditched them. I stumbled over glasses by accident.

While studying, I needed to buy a pair for reading. I visited an optician, bought some with metal frames and came out £150 worse off. I couldn’t understand why they were so expensive, so I did some research. Manufacturers were loath to give up their secrets but finally one revealed that the average pair of glasses is made for just £7. They agreed to supply me and I set up a website selling glasses from £15.

I set up the company with £1,100, the last instalment of my student loan. All the cost went on the web design. I put a notice on the board at uni, paid a guy £7 an hour to help to set up the business and persuaded the lab to hold the stock. When the orders came in, I’d got the cash upfront and the lab sent the glasses to the customer. The lab asked for money a month later, so I had two months before handing it over.

I started up in a student house in Bristol, then moved to my parents’ house in Malmesbury. At one point we had eight people at home; we chucked my sister out of her room and Mum and Dad were doing bacon rolls like a staff canteen.

The eureka moment came a fortnight after we’d started and the messages were coming in on the answer machine faster than I could delete them. We’d done no advertising, except to hand out leaflets at the local station. The biggest risk is putting your money where your mouth is and so signing a six-month lease on a converted barn, six weeks in, was terrifying.

In the first year, we had a turnover of £1 million and last year, it was £5 million. We are now selling one pair of glasses every three to four minutes, or 450 pairs a day, 3,500 a week. We’ve grown 50 to 100 per cent year-on-year and have probably saved the British public £50 million on prescription glasses.

Why I want to help

One of the biggest hurdles facing a person setting up his or her own business, is raising finance. In our case, we found that you don’t get a £5 million turnover with just £1,100. So by the summer of 2007 we found that we had to raise £3 million from venture capitalists. These outfits invest only in seven or eight companies a year, and positioning ourselves took a lot of time and hard work. On the day that we completed, our money was running out. It was terrifying. So in the morning we were preparing for the worst, and by the evening we were celebrating with £3 million in the bank.

When I was starting up ten business angels invested in me. They offered finance but also gave valuable advice. I’m keen to extend that ladder, partly because I feel that, as a young entrepreneur, I could really add to the experiences of others. I can talk about which investment or marketing methods worked for me and give advice accordingly. Ideally, the person I mentor would be interested in setting up a disruptive business, ie, one like mine that will change the marketplace, rather than an hotel which is more of the same. Starting out on your own is a big risk. He or she has to be passionate about the project before them, be open to new ideas and be prepared for the ups and downs.

Above all, it’s got to be cracking idea – a category-killing idea.

How to apply

In no more than 300 words, explain what your project is and in what ways you hope Jamie will help you. Then send your e-mail to the email address below. The selection process will take about a month, at which stage the winning entrants will meet Jamie for the first time. Your progess will be featured in a year-long series of follow-up articles in times2 and in this blog too.

mentor-james@thetimes.co.uk

Don’t delay, get those killer ideas across to Jamie today and good luck to you all.