Rapid growth in the sales and supply of glasses online required Spex4Less to find bigger facilities in order to react to customer demand. Purchasing glasses online has quickly gained acceptance as a realistic way of buying quality spectacles for significantly less than the high street. Where glasses bought online started as cheap single vision lenses in a limited range of frames, it has now developed into more complex prescriptions and frames including fashion rimless glasses and varifocal spectacles.Spex4Less has been a pioneer in developing the way glasses are bought online since 2004 and is now one of the largest suppliers in Europe.
Mark Bowden started www.Spex4Less.com above his opticians shop in Bolton five years ago.
"It started really just as a way to share my experience as an optician with a wider audience" said Mark, "But it quickly became clear that there was a huge segment of the glasses wearing population that was dissatisfied with the cost and selection of spectacles available on the high street".
The enquiry and order level started the day we opened the site for business, and has never looked back. It became clear that we needed to acquire specialist facilities and staff just to service the demand for online glasses, and to separate it completely from our high street operation. We felt that we had to be cautious in the rate at which we expanded and any new facilities that we moved to had to be ready in parallel as customer service and manufacturing cycle time could not be allowed to suffer. Our new building has the latest equipment to meet the most rigorous demands from our customers, and still has room to grow.
People buying their glasses online today still only accounts for about 5% of all spectacles bought in Europe, but as a segment it continues to grow rapidly. We anticipate that our new facilities are sufficient for our next stage of growth, but in the online world that can change quickly.
John Styles, who is managing the Wirral operation, commented "We are very happy with the way the transition preceded. We had a lot of work in progress that we successfully moved from Bolton to the Wirral without significantly impacting customers."
We now have all of our equipment up and running at full capability and while we have successfully attracted staff to join our team on the Wirral, one of our biggest challenges remains finding people from the optical industry who comprehend the potential and are comfortable working in such a vibrant and dynamic business. Supplying glasses online is a lot different to selling on the high street, and it takes someone special to grasp the opportunity going forward.
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