Taking a gamble
WILTSHIRE entrepreneur James Murray Wells had a clear focus when he started up his business and now he's got high street opticians running scared.
The 21-year-old was a final year English student at the University of the West of England in Bristol when he needed to buy some reading glasses.
But he was outraged by the £150 price-tag that the spectacles came with, which for a student comprised much more than a week's living expenses. Feeling piqued, James started researching why the glasses were so expensive.
"I made a few calls to see what the wholesale prices were," he said. "It took a while because the opticians' business is a bit of a closed shop. I found out that the wholesale prices was less than a tenth of the retail prices." Most glasses can be manufactured for considerably less than £10.
So he started a business buying from manufacturers and selling to customers for a lower mark-up than others.
James had planned to stay on at UWE and do a law conversion course, but the almost instant success of Glasses Direct ended that plan.
"I started Glasses Direct as a little bit of pocket money at the beginning of July. But by the end of August it was not just a job for one person."
By September Glasses Direct had had almost 9,000 calls, and the business was generating thousands of pounds a week.
So instead of returning to study, James decided to make a go of it. Up to that point he had been running the business from his parents' home just outside Tetbury, but he took the plunge and moved to Charlton Business Park in Malmesbury and employed a finance manager, a human resources manager and an operations manager. With a call centre and two dispensing opticians, the firm now employs 12 people.
Now there have been 500,000 hits on the website, and well over 30,000 calls and, James says, more than 10,000 customers. And incredibly the success of Glasses Direct came with hardly any advertising. In the early days James employed two girls to hand out flyers in the middle of Bristol but otherwise it was word of mouth that helped the company take hold.
One development on the cards is software that will allow someone browsing the Glasses Direct site to upload a picture of their face and then be able to superimpose pictures of glasses on to it, to give the impression of looking in the mirror.
James said: "You've got to gamble and this was an opportunity I was lucky enough to be presented with.
"It could signal a sea change, because the optical industry is worried about this. We sell glasses for what the mark up should be the price that the British public pays for glasses is a rip-off.
"I think we can take a significant share of the market although I'm not suggesting a majority and there are contact lenses and designer frames to be looked at, as well as going from country to country.
"We want to be seen as the best operation and we need to develop technologies to show we are the best."
And James says he believes high street opticians are feeling rattled.
"We have had correspondence from opticians who feel threatened but they felt threatened when Specsavers arrived in 1991."…
…How it works
The basis of Glasses Direct is the fact that opticians are legally obliged to give you, the customer, a legible copy of a glasses prescription after an eye test.
People have to be able to shop around to prevent any optician establishing a monopoly.
Glasses Direct encourages its customers to take the prescription away and then enter the prescription details online or call its hotline.
The glasses are then manufactured by the same firms that supply high street opticians, and dispatched by post to the customer.