Special Feature Section | HIGH EXPECTATIONS

Telling The Best Story

Whether an art-friendly enclave or a sleek and chic setting, writing your own story as an independent in the high end is filled with challenges and rewards

BY AMY SPIEZIO

Autobiographies of many independent opticians include stories of finding their routes to success on the high road, offering top-tier or luxury products in design-conscious settings to build like-minded communities.

For those who want to write their own success stories, there are going to be many chapters, filled with action, comedy, and drama. But most significantly, the true tales of success have a focus on specific and deeply personal products and procedures.

PROLOGUE

Whether your shop is going to be exclusively luxury or feature an expanded inventory that includes high-end options, having the best of the best in terms of product can reflect on your relationship with your patients.

“We want our selection of high-end frames to match the high level of eyecare we strive to provide all of our patients,” says Frisco Family Eye Care’s Stephen McDaniel, O.D. The Frisco, TX, practice has added new top-of-the line brands, including TAG Heuer, Bevel, and Black Fin, as of last month.

Setting out or adding on high-end product is a smart way to set a shop apart from the competition. Product from the independents is typically limited in quantity with exclusivity agreements helping ECPs keep their inventory unique to the area.

“I would say there is a growing trend in offices choosing to embrace independent eyewear over mass-produced and branded eyewear,” says Michael McConnell, owner of two independent eyewear shops in Michigan, Eyedentity Optical Boutique in Holland and Sight Optical boutique in Grand Rapids.

PLOTTING YOUR SETTING

Sometimes the presence at the top is simply a natural occurrence that comes from what a shop sets out to be. “We knew that [our store] was going to look very different. We wanted to present eyewear as design objects,” says Gai Gherardi, who founded l.a.Eyeworks in Los Angeles with Barbara McReynolds 35 years ago.

“It’s such a tired conversation now, but at the time, [shop design] was ficus plants and tchotchkes,” she adds. “Even if you had a nice presentation, it was not beautiful, there was no space around objects.” At that time, when it came to eyewear on display, “You didn’t look at it as objects of beauty, you looked at it because it was expensive, not because it was beautiful.”

Considering frames to be beautiful and artistic pieces, Gherardi and McReynolds decided to present eyewear in a different context. “We wanted to peel back everything around [the eyewear], and let the space define the object as much as the object defines the space,” Gherardi says.

As the years have passed and l.a.Eyeworks has expanded to include an additional shop as well as a wholesale heaquarters for their own designs, they’ve maintained their commitment to an artistic setting that fosters community and creativity.

“We’ve always made it an environment for discovery and experience, because it’s all about the vision—what you see and what’s around you,” says Gherardi “We’ve looked at our stores as being places for dialog and conversations.”

Valerie Vittu also knew her shops were going to offer and be something special. Coming to the U.S. from France, she worked in the luxury market, first selling Steinway pianos then working at Bergdorf Goodman. She started in optical as a bookkeeper for Alain Mikli. “Mikli’s mom taught me a lot,” she says. “She would stay for a week in September and March, and she taught me how to present the product, to take care of the customer, and how to look at them and not be limited by their classic taste, but to push them.”

Seven years ago she opened her first Margot & Camille store in Philadelphia—a store that was just named “Best of Philly” by the local Fox News. She recently opened another shop in Doylestown, PA, and also works as a wholesaler for a French private label. Focusing on fine products, often with a French flair, Vittu has found success and loyal customers in the high end through thick and thin. “I keep on growing, and each time the news says the economy is bad, my business goes up,” she says.

DERIVING A POINT OF VIEW

As a business grows, changes are inevitable, but those we spoke with note how important it is to represent a specific point of view and consistently deliver products and services that express that stance.

“I have to say I really dislike the term ‘high end’ as it really just relates to price point. I much prefer ‘independent eyewear,’” McConnell says. He takes his retail philosophy from working on the wholesale side of the business. “In order to stand apart from the masses, I needed to specialize in selling something unique and different. I needed something that the retailers could advertise as being exclusive. It was this line of thinking that we built upon in moving into retail.”

Gherardi says that a key to a solid business is having a real point of view. “I would tell someone [considering starting in this segment of the market] to look at who you are and say: ‘my business is going to be based on this, and if I’m the front of the house, I need to represent it and everything in there needs to represent my point of view so I can be honest with it.’”

That type of attitude is especially important when selling at the top of the market, she observes. “At that point, it’s not about selling something for a little less than someone else. That’s a very different kind of business. This is about presenting eyewear in an environment that is authentic to the owner. For me, that’s the model that works.”

French transplant Vittu makes her claim in the market with unique French product as well as items tailored to her urban and suburban patrons. “We find some products and niche brands that no one [in the area] has, so we don’t offer the same thing and it doesn’t look like anything the other dispensaries have.”

Vittu worked to create environments that reflect each of her locations, as well as her product selections.

The look of her new store, in the suburbs, is completely different than the urban Philly shop. She’s also adding a children’s department and biking eyewear and accessories, to appeal to local teens and women at home, all while maintaining her commitment to high-quality and new-to-the-market brands.

The design is also reflective of her point of view—unique and original. “We didn’t make it as a store like other stores in the area,” Vittu says. “The way we display the glasses is different, and the way set up the frames is different. We really went in a creative direction. We are using things to display frames that weren’t originally designed to display them. It’s very different.”

ADDING CHARACTERS

While a point of view starts at the owner level, it certainly doesn’t end there, especially as businesses go from single shop to multiple-site groups. Making the jump from cook, chef, and chief bottle washer to one who manages a team that shares a vision is another hallmark of success stories on the top level.

McConnell says: “As far as managing it all, it goes back to having a versatile, hardworking, and dedicated staff of people around me. It is the ability to trust these individuals that affords me the luxury of being able to give parts of myself to other endeavors.”

Growing your staff and sharing the load is an important lesson to learn, but it might not be an easy one. “The toughest thing is to realize that you can’t do it all,” Gherardi says. And it can bring something good to a shop to have well-trained people in addition to the owner or owners to support the growth process. “For me, it is really important to encourage someone who is starting to have a very edited point of view that is true to them.”

Framing Your OWN BUSINESS

A natural next step for many opticals at the high-end level is to step into the frame game beyond retail and into wholesale.

Valerie Vittu’s Margot and Camille collection is representative of a private label collection by a French OEM manufacturer. She says the collection gives ECPs an option for a French-made collection with a more controllable price point. “You have to find a way to have a product you can move that doesn’t cost [ECPs] as much. Having more stores lets you have bigger production, to then allow you to be affordable even with a French product so everyone can be unique,” she says.

While he doesn’t have his own collection now, Michigan optical shop owner MIchael McConnell says, ”Wholesale/design is something I really never left. I have over the last five years had a few small eyewear companies I have worked with behind the scenes in regards to design and the shaping of collections. It isn’t something I really seek out or something I publicize, but it is something that I enjoy doing and take great pride in when I get it right.” Experiencing this process has given him, “a great appreciation for people like Patty Perriera (Barton Perreira), David Pellicer (Etnia), Thomas Lafont (Lafont), Richard Mewha (Bevel), and Jason Kirk (Kirk & Kirk). The endless pool of creativity they are able to draw from each season is really quite amazing and is what sets their collections apart from what the masses do.”

One of the authors of one of the great independent success stories, Gai Gherardi says that l.a.Eyeworks had little choice but to manufacture their own eyewear to get the kind of product they wanted to sell. “There wasn’t a lot to buy,” Gherardi says. “This was the moment of the biggest logos you had ever seen on anything. It was the time of the most convoluted temple work you had ever seen—up, down, around, it looked like a treble clef—they were dropped, they were up, they were circled, and they were swooped and they were logofied.”

Gherardi and her business partner, Barbara McReynolds, were not interested in selling anything that looked like that. So they set out to find something else.

“What we were interested in was very archetypal,” she says. “At the time we loved the glasses that lifeguards were wearing and we wanted to pop the sunglasses out of them and put them on beautiful women as a juxtaposition of what people were thinking was feminine and masculine. We wanted to play with those ideas.”

Before jumping fully into product manufacturing, they approached manufacturers to see if they could make something work in 1979. “We begged Bausch + Lomb to make the Wayfarer in color. We said, ‘make it for us in five colors,’ and we were so close. They were making them in white at the time, but nobody bought them. We said, ‘We’ll take every one you’ve got!’ And we dyed them pink, we dyed them blue, we dyed them every color you can think.”

The same thing happened with Shuron frame in a dyable color that they sandblasted, colored, and otherwise made their own. But nothing lasts forever, so when the product inventory ran out, they decided to take the leap and find out about launching their own line. “We went to France and knocked on factory doors and asked if they would make our glasses,” Gherardi notes. “When we went to the first factory and handed them the technical drawing we had made, we said to them, ‘if you make this for us, we’ll make you famous! That’s how naïve—or sure—we were.

“They asked how many and we said how many, and when we heard the number we just about flipped. How we were ever going to sell 300 frames? But we said, ‘OK, yes, we’re going to do this.’ And we did,” she adds. “We were just fearless about it.”

The experience taught them more than how to get frames made—it also taught them how they wanted to do business. “There were a lot of people who wouldn’t give us an answer for anything, and Barbara and I made a pact very early on: if we had some success we were going to be free with our information, because it was so hard to get information; nobody wanted to tell us anything.”

Even though she and McReynolds have offices in the corporate center and have a design studio, keeping a finger on the pulse of the dispensing world has always been an inspiration for Gherardi. “I kept an office in the store, and I went there every morning because I love the pulse of the store, I love the think tank of it,” she says. “There’s nothing like the transformation people make with a great pair of glasses.”

With locations in Philadelphia and Doylestown—more than an hour apart—Vittu notes: “The fact is that I’ve had to delegate. I’m used to doing it myself and now I’m like: ‘you do that, you do that, you do that’...and now there are people to do my job.” Sometimes that can be a tough handover, but she also says she sees it as a enjoyable opportunity: “It’s still fun.”

WRITING THAT HAPPY ENDING

McConnell says he’s happy with the decision to get into this side of business. “We still need to work hard and do it better to survive, but that is a given in anything you do,” he says. A highlight for him is that, “There is an authenticity in working with independent collections like Etnia, Barton Perreira, Salt Optics, and Lafont that I don’t feel exists with branded/mass-produced eyewear. I choose to stand apart from others. I think those who start to embrace this product segment will be better off in the long run.”

Success gives you freedom, says Gherardi: “You’re not tied down by it, you’re set free by it. Energy begets energy and you just keep going, and that’s the great thing about owning your own business.”