Essilor Unveils it's Plans for Coastal.com

[coupe]

Mr Santini,
Thank you for your response. Your opinion and contributions, on this board are highly respected by me. Thank you.

[Barry Santini]

Thank you, but I'm rarely offended by responses/positions that challenge me or are conflict with my narrative at the time.

in fact, I welcome it.

Good Dialogue!

B

[optimensch]

"Thank you, but I'm rarely offended by responses/positions that challenge me or are conflict with my narrative at the time.

in fact, I welcome it."

+1.

[drk]

Gotta give Barry credit...he's 100% classy.

[coupe]

Taking the words directly from Essilor, you could read it to say. We the ECP's of the world feel that dispensing the simple stuff online is PERFECTLY CORRECT. It is hard to screw up a single vision lens and a PD. So all ECP can now sell online. But when it comes to the more complicated IE: EXpensive stuff, please see you local ECP because, for that stuff (we) Essilor charges the optical guy a fortune.

[Stan Tabor]

Let's look at the other side of the coin.

So which is better; Coastal continuing as a stand alone company freely giving away glasses and losing money to steal your market share or Essilor buying them and raising their prices and closing their brick and mortar retail store?

As an Essilor rep told me, maybe independents should be glad Essilor is dominating online as they will at least show some respect/restraint in how they compete. Essilor's bread and butter is the independents and this will continue for many many years to come. At some point could this end? Definitely. But if online is going to lead to the demise of the independent brick and mortar, it will happen a lot faster if a non-optical investor is leading the charge as opposed to Essilor.

Essilor's #1 responsibility is to maximize its share price. That is capitalism. Right or wrong, those are the rules. The rules also allow for you to take your business somewhere else. There are still plenty of choices. But don't you think that Essilor will want to protect its very large and profitable business with brick and mortar independents?

Do you know of any optical retailers that have closed because of an Essilor acquisition? Has any Essilor acquisition to date hurt your bottom line? The only people I see getting hurt are those who work for a lab they shut down. You are not going to dictate the rules of Essilor. But you can choose to play a different game. Our you can play the Essilor game and still make money. The key is playing the game and doing it well.

[m0002a]

Let's look at the other side of the coin.

So which is better; Coastal continuing as a stand alone company freely giving away glasses and losing money to steal your market share or Essilor buying them and raising their prices and closing their brick and mortar retail store?

As an Essilor rep told me, maybe independents should be glad Essilor is dominating online as they will at least show some respect/restraint in how they compete. Essilor's bread and butter is the independents and this will continue for many many years to come. At some point could this end? Definitely. But if online is going to lead to the demise of the independent brick and mortar, it will happen a lot faster if a non-optical investor is leading the charge as opposed to Essilor.

Essilor's #1 responsibility is to maximize its share price. That is capitalism. Right or wrong, those are the rules. The rules also allow for you to take your business somewhere else. There are still plenty of choices. But don't you think that Essilor will want to protect its very large and profitable business with brick and mortar independents?

Do you know of any optical retailers that have closed because of an Essilor acquisition? Has any Essilor acquisition to date hurt your bottom line? The only people I see getting hurt are those who work for a lab they shut down. You are not going to dictate the rules of Essilor. But you can choose to play a different game. Our you can play the Essilor game and still make money. The key is playing the game and doing it well.

Maximizing their share price is legal. Engaging in monopolistic behavior is not legal in the US, but tolerated in other countries for their own companies that do business globally. The problem with Essilor is that they are trying to control all the aspects of the optical business in a vertical manner, from manufacturing to retail. That gives them an unfair advantage over other manufacturers (who are not retailers) and over retailers (who are not manufacturers). In the past, the US government has broken up such monopolies to separate the businesses, for example:

• Separation of local and LD phone service, so that a consumer can choose any LD company regardless of what local phone service they have (this is less important now that we have wireless, internet phone, etc, but was very important at one time).
• Separation of natural gas pipeline companies from the companies that sell you the natural gas
• Many states have laws that require retail auto dealerships to be separate entities from auto manufacturers
• Separation of refraction from dispensing (requiring that patients be given a copy of the Rx after an exam)
• etc

It is not illegal per se if a company has vertical integration of their business (from manufacturing to retail), depending on their market share. But pretty soon Essilor will reach the point (if they have not already) where they have control over the market in an unfair and monopolistic manner. At some point it seems there may only be two companies, Essilor and Luxottica, that completely control everything. Whether this hurts independent opticals or consumers the worst, I am not sure, but someone is going to get screwed.

[drk]

Coastal was not doing well. Maybe it would have survived, maybe not.

Essilor didn't buy it to protect us. If essilor wanted it dead, they didn't have to buy it. They could have starved it.

Don't be naiive.

[Stan Tabor]

Coastal was not doing well. Maybe it would have survived, maybe not.

Essilor didn't buy it to protect us. If essilor wanted it dead, they didn't have to buy it. They could have starved it.

Don't be naiive.

I never said Essilor bought it to protect independents. They may have done this to protect their business with independents. Two different things.

And how could Essilor have starved Coastal?

I do agree Coastal could not continue under its current business model. But someone else would have bought them for their customer list and to attempt to turn them around.

[Golfnorth]

I never said Essilor bought it to protect independents. They may have done this to protect their business with independents. Two different things.

And how could Essilor have starved Coastal?

I do agree Coastal could not continue under its current business model. But someone else would have bought them for their customer list and to attempt to turn them around.

Essilor couldn't have starved Coastal per se but they could have chose not to purchase them and let them die a natural death. Remember Coastal never did made a profit with their existing business model.

Regards,
Golfnorth

[Chris Ryser]

There will be between 20 and 23 million pairs of glasses sold in North America by the larger online opticals in 2014 of which Essilors share is now about 55-60%. They have not bought yet the Warby Parker, Zenni, and Firmoo.

Here is the list of the largest in order of website traffic:

WarbyParker

Zenni Optical

FramesDirect (Essilor USA)

Mr Spex, Germany

Eyebuydirect

Firmoo Optical

Clearly Contacts Canada (ESSILOR FRANCE) Coastal Contacts-Glasses, (ESSILOR FRANCE)

Glasses.com (ESSILOR FRANCE)

Glasses Direct, UK, Prescription Eyewear Ltd.

39 Dollar Glasses

Gkboptical.com India (Essilor- India)



All these millions of pairs are not sold by ECP's, and next years it will be millions more.

[Chris Ryser]

Progressive lenses are similar to Bifocal lenses, having two partitions - the Distance and Reading portions. However, there is no visible line to distinguish the partitions. Though having two magnifications on them, they look more like a pair of Single Vision lenses.

That is from their website at: http://www.eyebuydirect.com/fashion-...k-p-12049.html


..................No Varilux, made by somebody else

[ak47]

See my post for a description of the "relationship".

well stated !!

[Stan Tabor]

There will be between 20 and 23 million pairs of glasses sold in North America by the larger online opticals in 2014 of which Essilors share is now about 55-60%. They have not bought yet the Warby Parker, Zenni, and Firmoo.

Here is the list of the largest in order of website traffic:

WarbyParker

Zenni Optical

FramesDirect (Essilor USA)

Mr Spex, Germany

Eyebuydirect

Firmoo Optical

Clearly Contacts Canada (ESSILOR FRANCE) Coastal Contacts-Glasses, (ESSILOR FRANCE)

Glasses.com (ESSILOR FRANCE)

Glasses Direct, UK, Prescription Eyewear Ltd.

39 Dollar Glasses

Gkboptical.com India (Essilor- India)



All these millions of pairs are not sold by ECP's, and next years it will be millions more.

Chris- A couple of comments:

I am not sure where you get your data, but online is only 3% of eyewear sales. Compared to online, managed care is a bigger threat to most independents.

Essilor does not own Glasses.com. This is owned by Lux.

Not sure where you get 55% to 60% of online sales going to Essilor. There are dozens of onlines out there. Essilor owns 3. They are big ones, but still only 3. Alexa rank does not equate to sales. It could be this %, but my guess is that it is much less.

[Barry Santini]

Stan:
latest info has online now at 4%

FWIW.

B