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Glassesdirect - it might just work
Opticians are a con, says James Murray Wells. His dotcom, Glassesdirect, is exposing the sham by undercutting the high street retailers. But will it work?
It’s a rip off. Highway robbery!” James Murray Wells is sounding less like a pimply 21-year-old from Wiltshire, and more like an Alabama baptist minister. “High street opticians are marking up glasses by 2,000 per cent. Pensioners are handing over a month’s pension for something that actually costs £10 to make. There is more metal in a teaspoon than a pair of glasses. Tell me why they cost so much?”
I can’t. And neither would the optical industry when Murray Wells made a few discreet enquiries in spring 2004. He was doing his finals and had been to buy a pair of reading glasses. The cost? £150. “Why so much?” he asked. His optician refused to tell him. So the intrepid lad called the manufacturer. No answer. He called other factories, opticians and industry spokesmen. Omerta. And then a disgruntled employee at a laboratory in the North of England spilt the beans. “He talked me through the industry. Turns out that a £150 pair of glasses cost £7 to make.”
Instead of penning an expletive-ridden letter to Esther Ranzen, or sticking a traffic cone through his optician’s shop window, Murray Wells plotted a different sort of revenge. “I knew I’d found an opportunity too good to miss,” he recounts.
Murray Wells was supposed to be boning up on Ibsen, but instead found himself immersed in the glasses industry. He learnt about optometrical testing. About how the frames are made and the lenses are cut. He discovered that the market is 70 per cent controlled by just four high street retailers: Vision Express, Boots, Dolland & Aitchison and Specsavers.
So, with £5,000 in backing from his dad, Murray Wells created Glassesdirect.com – a website that would sell glasses for a more modest mark-up. The site needed to be cheap to build, so he posted a message on the university notice boards. “I hired two students – one who built me the website and designed the logo, and another who developed a My SQL database to run the back end.” He found a supplier who’d supply the frames, and a lab to deal with lens production and assembly. And even though he was paying the normal wholesale rate for frames and lenses, Murray Wells found he could charge only £15 for a pair of reading glasses – including delivery.
On July 1 Glassesdirect went live. To get his message out to the world, Murray Wells handed out flyers in Bristol city centre. He placed a small ad in the Western Daily Press newspaper. “Things were very slow at first. I would check my inbox every day. And occasionally I’d get an order.” For a while Murray Wells was sure the business would remain a one man operation, run, like many dotcoms, out of a bedroom.Then, bingo.
“I went on holiday in August for two weeks. When I got back, I thought I’d better check the site.” There were dozens of enquiries. Word of mouth had propelled Glassesdirect over its tipping point a mere eight weeks after launch. Murray Wells hired a pal to help process the orders. “Pretty soon I had eight employees – all friends or family – working in my parent’s house, while my mum made lunch.” Mum soon ordered the firm to relocate in a nearby converted barn.
Concerted efforts to sabbotage the new venture have proved fruitless. In September, his main supplier mysteriously dropped him. “They suddenly said they couldn’t do business with me. I reckon they had pressure put on them by a high-street chain. It took me a week to find a new supplier and re-do the website.” The trade press confirmed his paranoia when letters and articles appeared questioning the firm’s credentials and the General Optical Council launched an investigation. “Groundless attacks. I have fully qualified opticians working in labs, making the glasses.
“I was on GMTV today, arguing with an exec from Specsavers. I gave him a right grilling,” says Murray Wells. And though he has received some flak because of his inability to conduct eyetests, he is unfazed. “We can’t do them, but cheap eye tests are used to distract the customer from extortionate glasses prices.”
Whether it’s this righteousness, or his precociousness, or the sheer simplicity of the proposition, Glassesdirect is working. “In seven months, we’ve got 15,000 customers, half a million hits on our website, and handled over 30,000 telephone calls.” To get business from internet-phobic OAPs, Glassesdirect now has a printed catalogue, too. And he’s advertising with Google and Overture.
Glassesdirect already stocks 10,000 frames, and is adding designer brands, contact lenses and ski-goggles to its repertoire. What’s next? “We are working on technology to let people submit digital photos of themselves, and try on glasses virtually,” he adds. He is looking to buy a lab, so he can produce the lenses himself. “This would cost between £500,000 and £1m. I think I can secure the loan on the strength of our balance sheet.”
Is he out of his depth? Murray Wells has “no formal business training”, and his plans to export the concept to the USA, Ireland and France seem to rely on finding a friend willing to take on the challenge. But the old-Harrovian, disarmingly candid about his blind spots, has recruited familiar faces to add some grey hair to the venture. “I used to do work experience at an engineering plc. The former boss and the accounts guy now work for me at Glassesdirect.”
“There are lots of things I don’t know about. I’m still learning. That’s why I’m surrounding myself with experienced people, and look for advice where I can get it.”
As to its potential, however, he is rather less modest. “It might just work?” Murray Wells asks, indignant. “It already is!”