 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Online retailer |
| Founded | 2008 |
| Headquarters | Kensington, London, England |
Area served | UK, Germany, Italy, France, Spain |
Key people | Mitesh Patel, Founder |
| Products | Contact lenses |
| Parent | EssilorLuxottica |
Lenstore is an online optical retailer, specialising in contact lenses, solutions and other accessories and eye care products.
Lenstore was founded on 3 January 2008 by Oxford graduate, Mitesh Patel. [1] The website went live on 11 June 2008 and by 2012 the company had entered the Sunday Times Fast Track 100 in 10th place. [2] Lenstore had served over 100,000 customers by 2013, despite not being the only online-only lens and glasses retailer in the UK. [3] This growth was aided by a desire in the UK to buy lenses cheaper, and not just from high street opticians. Guides were subsequently created to help UK customers identify the correct lens to purchase online (as high street opticians would often rebrand lenses). [4]
In late 2013, the start-up was acquired by GrandVision. [5] [6] This saw Lenstore become a sister company to UK high-street optician Vision Express, allowing the company to offer customers face-to-face eye care. [7] A version of the Lenstore website was launched in Germany in 2016.
In April 2018 Lenstore & Nikon created the world's first gigapixel timelapse, with London as the subject. The 7.3 gigapixel timelapse was taken from the top of Canary Wharf using a Nikon D850 camera and a Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 300mm lens. [8]
In 2019 Lenstore teamed up with charity Colour Blindness Awareness UK to highlight the plight of people with colour blindness by showcasing how they see the world. The campaign highlighted 3 different types of colour blindness including Tritanopia, Protanopia and Deuteranopia. [9] [10]
Color blindness or color vision deficiency (CVD) is the decreased ability to see color or differences in color. The severity of color blindness ranges from mostly unnoticeable to full absence of color perception. Color blindness is usually an inherited problem or variation in the functionality of one or more of the three classes of cone cells in the retina, which mediate color vision. The most common form is caused by a genetic condition called congenital red–green color blindness, which affects up to 1 in 12 males (8%) and 1 in 200 females (0.5%). The condition is more prevalent in males, because the opsin genes responsible are located on the X chromosome. Rarer genetic conditions causing color blindness include congenital blue–yellow color blindness, blue cone monochromacy, and achromatopsia. Color blindness can also result from physical or chemical damage to the eye, the optic nerve, parts of the brain, or from medication toxicity. Color vision also naturally degrades in old age.
Glasses, also known as eyeglasses or spectacles, are vision eyewear with clear or tinted lenses mounted in a frame that holds them in front of a person's eyes, typically utilizing a bridge over the nose and hinged arms, known as temples or temple pieces, that rest over the ears.
Contact lenses, or simply contacts, are thin lenses placed directly on the surface of the eyes. Contact lenses are ocular prosthetic devices used by over 150 million people worldwide, and they can be worn to correct vision or for cosmetic or therapeutic reasons. In 2010, the worldwide market for contact lenses was estimated at $6.1 billion, while the US soft lens market was estimated at $2.1 billion. Multiple analysts estimated that the global market for contact lenses would reach $11.7 billion by 2015. As of 2010, the average age of contact lens wearers globally was 31 years old, and two-thirds of wearers were female.
Luxottica Group S.p.A. is an Italian eyewear conglomerate based in Milan. As a vertically integrated company, Luxottica designs, manufactures, distributes, and retails its eyewear brands all through its own subsidiaries. The company, presently organized as a subsidiary of EssilorLuxottica which formed when the Italian conglomerate merged with the French optical firm Essilor, is the world's largest company in its industry, both prior to and after its merger with Essilor.
An optician is an individual who fits eyeglasses or contact lenses by filling a refractive prescription from an optometrist or ophthalmologist. They are able to translate and adapt ophthalmic prescriptions, dispense products, and work with accessories. There are several specialties within the field.
A fisheye lens is an ultra wide-angle lens that produces strong visual distortion intended to create a wide panoramic or hemispherical image. Fisheye lenses achieve extremely wide angles of view, well beyond any rectilinear lens. Instead of producing images with straight lines of perspective, fisheye lenses use a special mapping, which gives images a characteristic convex non-rectilinear appearance.
Specsavers Optical Group Ltd is a British multinational optical retail chain, which operates mainly in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and the Nordic countries. The chain offers optometry and optician services for eyesight testing and sells glasses, sunglasses, and contact lenses. It also sells hearing aids. In the United Kingdom in 2012 it had the largest single market share of the four major opticians, with 42% of the market.
Essilor International is an international ophthalmic optics company that designs, manufactures and markets lenses to correct or protect eyesight. Its headquarters is in Charenton-le-Pont, France.
Dollond & Aitchison was one of the oldest chains of retail opticians in the United Kingdom, having been established in 1750. The business was absorbed into Boots Opticians in 2009 and stores were rebranded under the Boots Opticians name, completed in 2015.
High-energy visible light is short-wave light in the violet/blue band from 400 to 450 nm in the visible spectrum, which has a number of purported negative biological effects, namely on circadian rhythm and retinal health, which can lead to age-related macular degeneration. Increasingly, blue blocking filters are being designed into glasses to avoid blue light's purported negative effects. However, there is no good evidence that filtering blue light with spectacles has any effect on eye health, eye strain, sleep quality or vision quality.
Eyewear is a term used to refer to all devices worn over both of a person's eyes, or occasionally a single eye, for one or more of a variety of purposes. Though historically used for vision improvement and correction, eyewear has also evolved into eye protection, for fashion and aesthetic purposes, and starting in the late 20th century, computers and virtual reality.
James Nicholas Murray Wells OBE is an English entrepreneur and was founder, owner and executive chairman of Prescription Eyewear Limited, London, which he started whilst at university in 2004 and sold to Cipio Partners in 2013. At the time of the sale, the business had grown to employ more than 150 people, with sales of £29.9m in the year ending April 2013 and was selling to 50 overseas markets. He is currently Industry Head of Retail at Google UK.
Vision Action is a registered charity in the United Kingdom, which provides optical aid and services to developing countries in Africa.
Optical Express is a provider of ophthalmology services including laser eye surgery, cataract surgery and lens replacement surgery in the United Kingdom and Europe.
TD Tom Davies is a British handmade eyewear brand, founded by Tom Davies in 2002. TD Tom Davies offers a bespoke service on all frames of their collections. Its headquarters is in West London.
Eyebuydirect, Inc. is an online retailer of prescription glasses, based in Austin, Texas. The company also sells prescription and non-prescription sunglasses, sport sunglasses, and computer glasses designed to reduce glare. Eyebuydirect was founded in 2005 by Roy Hessel, who was succeeded by Sunny Jiang, chief executive officer since 2017. The company has operations in the United States and China, and sells its products worldwide.
FramesDirect.com is an international online eyewear retailer. The company sells eyewear products such as eyeglasses, prescription sunglasses, sunglasses, and contact lenses through its website. FramesDirect.com sells designer and brand name eyewear products with over 60,000 models displayed on its website. Founded in 1996, FramesDirect.com was one of the earliest online optical retail stores.
Eye care in the United Kingdom is available through the National Health Service. Eye care in the community is almost entirely provided by optometrists in private practice. Specialist NHS services are provided from a small number of eye hospitals, and their staff often run clinics in general hospitals in their region.
Clearly is an online retailer of contact lenses, eyeglasses and sunglasses. The company was acquired by EssilorLuxottica Canada, and is headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. They are one of the largest online contact lens retailers in North America, and the largest seller of prescription eyeglasses online in the world.
Color blind glasses or color correcting lenses are light filters, usually in the form of glasses or contact lenses, that attempt to alleviate color blindness, by bringing deficient color vision closer to normal color vision or to make certain color tasks easier to accomplish. Despite its viral status, the academic literature is generally skeptical of the efficacy of color correcting lenses.