Glasses direct blog

Our job is to bring the cost of prescription glasses down and to help you enjoy your choice of glasses more.

We’ve gone one step further with a Free Glasses For Life prize draw.

Of all the people we’d love to enter the draw, here are a few of our favourite online personalities and bloggers – what do you say guys, will you enter our draw? We’re not saying your current ones are bad, we’d just love to see you in our Glasses Direct frames!

Top 10 glasses wearers we’d love to enter our draw…

1. Mike Butcher – Always seen out and about at the latest startup and tech business events in his stylish specs, if Mike won he’d never have to ‘invest’ in another pair of glasses again!

2. Stephen Fry – The cream of the Twitterati, Stephen might like a chance of winning some glasses to help him read the thousands of 140 characters messages he gets every day.

3. Hermione Way – Techfluff.tv wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t for Hermione’s signature specs. Perhaps some Ray-Ban style specs will help her stand out when she’s looking for celebs to interview?

4. Jack Schofield – We’d like to ‘Ask Jack’ what glasses he would choose if he won a free pair of glasses for life. It’s a pity we can’t offer him a free smoking pipe for life!

5. Bill Thompson – While there haven’t been any glasses invented to see into the future (yet), no doubt Bill T will be the first person to get his hands on them when they do.

6. Biz Stone – Best known as one of the co-founders of micro-blogging service Twitter, this glasses-wearing entrepreneur also helped make Xanga, Blogger, Odeo, and Obvious. Biz is based in the USA but if he wanted a pair of glasses from us next time he’s in the UK we’d be able to help

7. Charlie Leadbeater – Author of ‘We-think’, Charles is a leading authority on innovation and creativity.  Charlie’s got some really cool black glasses so maybe he’d be interested in trying some of our colourful styles.

8. Cory Doctorow – He’s a busy man: science fiction novelist, blogger, technology activist, co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing (boingboing.net) amongst others. For such a busy man, our home trials service and online ordering are a must!

9. Andy McLoughlin – we could have chosen Andy or his co-founder Alistair but we love the work that Andy and his team at Huddle are doing around web innovation. They’re based in London so will want some of our most classy designer-style frames.

10. Dan Martin – The Editor of BusinessZone.co.uk, advice for small businesses in the UK. Dan seems to prefer the titanium style glasses so he might like to try one of our black, acetate ranges to see how he likes them.

Here are the details of the draw: up to 8 people will never pay for glasses again, we’ll give them new prescription glasses every year for the rest of their life. You can enter the prize draw at www.freeglassesforlife.co.uk

This year we asked for ideas, pictures, suggestions for the design on the front of our free microfibre cleaning cloth that comes with each pair of specs that we ship. You can see the original post about the competion here.

The competition closed on February the 27th and we had tons of entries. We’ve tried to get in touch with everyone who took the time to send us their ideas to say thank you as I’ve been overwhelmed by the response. Some of the people we’ve been in touch with said that we could publish their entry on our blog, so Paula Norris our graphic designer, has knocked them up into a big mosaic. Now for the difficult part of choosing the winner. Stay tuned for a further update…

We send out a free microfibre cleaning cloth with every pair of glasses we sell. This year we will be redesigning it, and I thought that it would be best if the challenge of designing it was opened up to you, as well as us

My own entry will be based on inspiration from Damien Hirst’s dots – I think the picture’s called Opium…

If you’re up for this then you’ll need to email me your entry. This can be either a fully fledged photoshop file, a link to something that provides inspiration, a scan of a doodle on the back of an envelope, or anything really that conveys the idea for the design. We can do the final artwork. Make sure that you send it to Cloth Design Competition by Friday 27th February at 6pm. We’ll then set about the task of picking the winner.

In return, well, all we can offer you is the immense sense of satisfaction from seeing your design/doodle/creation end up on our cleaning cloths for at least a year, with a namecheck at the bottom ‘Cloth design by [your name]‘, a blog post putting you and your design on a podium, and a lifetime’s supply of cleaning cloths! We’ll also throw in a pair of glasses of your choosing from the website to the lucky winner.

Good luck!