How one giant company will dominate the way the whole world sees...........
Thu 10 May 2018 07.13 BST
If you have been wearing glasses for years, like me, it can be surprising to discover that you perceive the world thanks to a few giant companies that you have never heard of.Worrying about the fraying edge of motorway lights at night, or words that slide on the page, and occasionally spending a fortune at the opticians is, for many of us, enough to think about. And spectacles are unusual things. It is hard to think of another object in our society which is The $100bn (£74bn) eyewear industry is built on feelings such as this. In the trade, the choreography that takes you from the consulting room to the enticing, bare-brick display of £200 frames is known as “romancing the product”. The number of eye tests that turn into sales is the “capture rate”, which most opticians in Britain (or optometrists, as they are known in the rest of the world) set at around 60%. During The 20th century, the eyewear business worked hard to transform a physical deficiency in a statement of style. In the process, optical retailers learned the strange fact that for something that costs only a few pounds to make (even top-of-the-range frames and lenses cost, combined, no more than about £30 to produce), we arehappy, happier in fact, when paying 10 or 20 times that amount. “The margins,”as one veteran of the sector told me carefully, “are outrageous.” The co-founder of Specsavers, Mary Perkins, is Britain’s First self-made female billionaire.oth a medical device that you don’t want and a fashion accessory which you do.
Almost everyone wears glasses at some point in their lives. In developed countries, the rule of thumb is that around 70% of adults need corrective lenses to see well. In Britain, that translates to some 35 million people. But it’s hardly a topic of national conversation. To the casual observer, the optical market also presents a busy and confusing sight. In Britain, thousands of independent opticians rub alongside a few big retail chains such as Specsavers, Vision Express and Boots. The wall displays in even a small, local optician hold several hundred frames, metal, acetate and rimless, while posters advertise a range of lenses with sciencey-sounding properties – “freeform”, “photo-fusion”, “reflex vision” – and names so bland they are hard to remember even when you are looking straight at them.
But what we see masks the underlying structure of the global eyewear business. Over the last generation, just two companies have risen above all the rest to dominate the industry. The lenses in my glasses – and yours too, most likely – are made by Essilor, a French multinational that controls almost half of the world’s prescription lens business and has acquired more than 250 other companies in the past 20 years.
There is a good chance, meanwhile, that your frames are made by Luxottica, an Italian company with an unparalleled combination of factories, designer labels and retail outlets. Luxottica pioneered the use of luxury brands in the optical business, and one of the many powerful functions of names such as Ray-Ban (which is owned by Luxottica) or Vogue (which is owned by Luxottica) or Prada (whose glasses are made by Luxottica) or Oliver Peoples (which is owned by Luxottica) or high-street outlets such as LensCrafters, the largest optical retailer in the US (which is owned by Luxottica), or John Lewis Opticians in the UK (which is run by Luxottica), or Sunglass Hut (which is owned by Luxottica) is to make the marketplace feel more varied than it actually is.
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https://www.theguardian.com/news/201...ilor-luxottica
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