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Glasses Direct

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There are few people involved in selling glasses who have not followed the well-worn paths through optometry or dispensing colleges. So who would have predicted that a 22 year old English graduate would have caused much ado about something like Jamie Murray Wells has managed in the past eight months?

In that short time, he has challenged not only the might of multiples, but also the entire business model upon which optics is built.

The story of how Murray Wells started Glasses Direct will be known to most readers already – student needs new glasses , is shocked at price, researches market, finds that cost price is less than £7, sets up website.

The business began with a few flyers handed out in Bristol and the message The Direct Challenge spread by word of mouth until a Daily Telegraph journalist ran the story on August 18. By September 1, the publicity from the ‘silly season’ article, as one industry commentator dismissed it at the time, had snowballed. Murray Wells appeared on radio and TV and the message was spreading.

Since then, other than a slight copy write hitch with product images used on the site, everything has gone exactly the way a dot-com entrepreneur would want it to.

Last month saw another wave of publicity: when you suddenly start offering people a product for around 5=10 % of the price people are used to, the press will sit up and take notice.

The difference between last August’s publicity and that of the past few weeks, says Murray Wells, is that last summer it did not focus so much on the price. ‘At no point have we actually pushed this publicity on the price of glasses being at an extortionate level. This is something that the press have picked up on. We’ve sold the story of our business and they have gone out and done the research and decided the price of glasses is extortionate.’

What has riled much of the profession, however, is how few column inches have been allocated to explain why opticians use such high margins on their product, ie to subsidise the cost of their professional time. So does he agree with the popular media’s opinion that high street opticians routinely profiteer?

‘The kinds of margins that we’re talking about in glasses are much more than the average consumer would expect from a retail product. But we Know why that is. Whether or not I think that the prices are justified is a different matter. I mean, of course I’m aware that opticians have other overheads to fund and what ever else, but on the surface of it they are hugely inflated prices.’

Murray Wells believes that until opticians introduce a system where the patient pays a fair price for professional time and for products, they will always be susceptible to rip off allegations.

‘Free eye tests’ and the £18.39 reimbursed by the DoH for NHS sight test both only serve to devalue the optometrist’s input into the healthcare system. ‘Then emphases changes from being on the optometrist to put up his fees to being on the government would be forced to pay for it.’

None of this, however, is Murray Wells’ problem, as he looks at it from the consumers’ point of view. Multiples’ buy-one-get-one- free offers – which he describes as ‘patronising’ – only serve to confuse consumers. ‘Customers won’t understand why they can get £15 glasses from Glasses Direct and why they have to pay £90 for the same pair at boots. They won’t understand why opticians can afford to give away one pair of glasses, if the first one costs £100.

‘There’s a serious case here, not just for business model change, but also for honesty and integrity when dealing with patients. The customer is being deceived into believing that they’re are paying for something that there not. There’s a serious case here of none-transparency…. if opticians are going to be honest with their patients, then there going to make the glasses at normal retail price and there going to make the sight test at the correct fee.’

CATALYSY FOR CHANGE

So could it be that Murray Wells’ business and the recent spate of rip off allegations from the national media might in the long term provide profession a helping hand? By offering a catalyst that might see reform in the way the NHS handles eye care?
‘ I’m here to create a great business, to establish Glasses Direct as a robust steadfast business model in the public eye and something that is a long-term, achievable, workable solution to the internet dispensing. As an offshoot to that we might do [optometrists] a favour if they take the hint that they need to be charging a professional fee in relation to the services they give.
‘I’m not going to be the one beating the drum for these guys, there are other people that do that. I’m just observing and I make the observation that there seems to be a very confused issue of pricing and a very illogical issue of cross-subsidisation. Both of these need to be sorted out for the benefit of the patient, the optician and l timately the NHS.’

KEEPING WITHIN THE LAW

The profession’s problem with Murray Wells is not just his low prices, but how he keeps them low. Where is the professional input that drives up high street spectacles’ costs?

From the beginning, he has strived to ensure that his operation is lawful. The Opticians Act requires that a person will not sell an optical appliance unless ‘effected by or under the supervision of a registered medical practitioner or registered optician’.

And this, according to Murray Wells is exactly what Glasses Direct does. ‘We have up to four dispensing opticians at any one time who will become involved with every single order, a minimum of one. We have in our employment, opticians who are contractually obliged to supervise the dispensing of all our glasses. Whether they are at our call centre or whether they are at the laboratories we use is of absolutely no difference to the customer. Wherever they are along the sales process they are still in a position of intervene, to accept or reject the order, to task for more information. They are still in a position to supervise the entire sale of that order, it doesn’t matter which office they’re in.’

Reports that the GOC was ‘formally considering’ a complaint made by Boots Opticians professional services director David Cartwright have only been greeted by ‘no comment’ from a GOC spokesman. Indeed the entire topic of the internet dispensing was out of bounds in a recent discussion between optician and the GOC.

Cartwright asserts the ‘supervision’ requires a physical presence in the location of the sale. He also believes a process whereby the patient transcribes details of their Rx into a website with a self-measured PD or an average PD ‘cannot amount to proper supervision’.

First, Murray Wells says he has not been contacted by the GOC and makes the point that Cartwright is a competitor, not a customer of Glasses Direct. ‘That should send alarm bells ringing at the GOC.’

On the reported complaint Murray Wells says: ‘I assume he’s saying that we would benefit from qualified and experienced contact with our customers. But Cartwright knows just as well as I know that many high street opticians are fronted by entirely unqualified members of staff. So there is a touch of irony about the whole situation anyway.

‘On that note, it should be pointed out, although we are not, and I’m absolutely confident of this, legally obliged to have a dispensing optician in our call centre, we are actually going to the lengths of employing one.

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