An article in The Guardian this week has focused on the G20 summit currently taking place in Nice this week and among the items on the agenda has been the much publicised Robin Hood Tax. This is in no small part thanks to the presence of actor Bill Nighy ( him of the cool, geeky glasses…….and Love Actually fame) who has got behind the tax reform with the same gusto he normally reserves for the big screen.

Right on, Bill.

In essence, it is asking for a tiny tax to be implemented on the world financial sectors, thus creating hundreds of billions of dollars which could then be used to improve public services world wide and at the same time help reduce poverty and debt throughout the countries of the world. The UK alone would generate £20 billion in extra cash.

Shop The Nighy Look:

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With Nighy being joined by other famous names like Nicholas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, Bill Gates and even The Archbishop of Canterbury the Robin Hood tax is growing in recognition by the day and currently has web support at 97,398 people. Not bad for an idea that has only been in the public eye for 19 months.

And the reason for Bill Nighy getting behind the cause?……”I blame Richard Curtis…..everyone else does”. Get’s our vote!

Image courtesy of photon_de

If anyone in London fancies coming in to help us out with some research on new functionality, then we have some slots left.

It will be in our baker street offices, and should last around an hour, and we’ll give you a voucher for £40 to spend on our site as a thank you. You can see some ideas for the site, and give your views on what we should change/do.

They’ll be during work hours next week, but if you can’t do that and are interested in taking part any other future research we’re doing then get in contact and we’ll put you on the list for future projects.

If you’re interested drop me an email at david.carruthers@glassesdirect.co.uk

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 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!