Glasses direct blog

…you’ll see these posters on our walls.

The first is a poster showing our ‘Guiding Principles’. These principles have evolved over time. As you might expect, these guidelines are mostly concerned with ensuring our customer is at the forefront of our mind at all times and that the company is a fun, rewarding and inspiring place to work for.

Whilst the first poster illustrates the way we like to go about business with each other, the second poster answers the question ‘What is special about Glasses Direct?’ or simply, ‘What do we do?’

There is always more we can do to learn and improve our proposition, and we are constantly learning and developing based on your feedback, but these posters show what we aspire to be. Let us know what you think in the comments below, especially if you think we have missed anything out.

What’s sexy, multitalented and every celebrities’ best friend? That’s right – a pair of sunglasses. Whether glamming up an outfit, hiding a hangover from the paps, or simply blocking the sun – shades are a star’s must-have accessory.

Copy these celebs’ summer specs appeal with our suggested lookalike versions, and be left with more than enough change for a round of ice creams. Happy days.

Victoria Beckham

All the talk recently has been about VBs third boob job, but headline magnet and fashion designer Victoria Beckham keeps her trademark cool in a pair of on-trend oversized designer sunglasses.

Emulate her elegance with these oval French Connection shades.

Lily Allen

Ladette Lily looks as lovely as ever in a pair of vintage-style sunglasses that match her down-to-earth retro dress. Check out our similar shades below

Jake Gyllenhaal

Jake Gyllenhaal does the effortless hot Hollywood heartthrob thing in a casual t-shirt and 80s-style black Wayfarer sunnies. Our Mai Tai glasses look just like Jake’s pair of shades. Simply add a sunglasses tint when personalising your glasses, to get the same look.

Nicole Ritchie

Nicole Richie accessorises her huge patterned shades with a feminine headscarf as she hits the shops in Beverley Hills. Get Nicole’s look with a pair of our Frankie glasses, simply add a sunglasses tint when you personalise your specs.

Robbie Williams

Robbie Williams looks every the bit the cheeky chap millions love him for being as he leaves a London recording studio. Add a dark sunglasses tint to our Cosmopolitan glasses to get the rockin’ Robbie look.

Photo courtesy of D Sharon Pruitt

Are you feeling the love this summer? You are according to new research* that reveals that over half of us (53%) believe in love at first sight. Awwww!

But what’s this? The same report suggests more than one in five Brits will actively avoid making eye contact with a stranger we find attractive. The reason for such shyness is no doubt complex, but one simple step to giving more ooomph to your ogle is to actively care for your eyes.

David Hutchfield FBDO, a dispensing optician at Glasses Direct says, “If you believe in falling in love at first sight, one key way of giving Cupid a helping hand is to consciously look after your eye sight every day – not only to look good but to stay healthy and well.”

To keep your eyes looking good for romance, David’s suggests these top tips:

1. Eat and drink healthily

A balanced diet rich in fruit and vegetables is important for both your general health and your eye health. Stock up on broccoli and spinach. Both are packed full of lutein, thought to play a major role in preventing damage to the macula, the central point of the retina needed to see fine detail, like words on a page.

2. Oily fish

like salmon, tuna and mackerel are good, too – full of Omega-3 fatty acids said to reduce the risk of age-related macular Degeneration (AMD for short), the main cause of sight loss in the UK. Drink plenty of water too.

3. Be smart with make-up

Ditch eye make-up when as soon as it reaches its ‘use by’ date (with mascara, for example, it’s six months). And don’t share it. Or apply it when travelling – in case you scratch your eye and spread potentially harmful bacteria.

4. Stop smoking

It damages the cells in your retina and doubles the risk of developing AMD.

5. Have a regular eye test

“Visit an optometrist every two years or so. They’re eye ‘doctors’, trained not only to test your sight and prescribe glasses but to spot any problems and treat infections” says David. “You’re also welcome to contact us with any questions or concerns you have about your eyes.”

* By The College of Optometrists.

Asking for questions on twitter the other day, this one came in:

http://twitter.com/catalogbiz/statuses/2017607429

What does the Axis part on the prescription mean? What is “average”?

I asked another David, one of our team of dispensing opticians:

“The axis is the orientation of the astigmatism. The value is in degrees, and can be anything from 1 to 180. There is no average value, and the number doesn’t have any relevance to the size of the astigmatism ( that is indicated in the CYL box ).

Its probably best described as being like a compass bearing. The bearing you walk on doesn’t relate to how far you walk, its just the direction of travel.”

And an astigmatism? What’s that?

“Instead of being spherical like a football, most eyes are cylinder shaped, a bit like a rugby ball, and need correcting in two meridians; a spherical (SPH) component, and a cylindrical, or astigmatic (CYL) one. The AXIS is the direction along which the cylindrical component (astigmatism) lies.”

So there you go, hope that helps out. How’s the language? Understandable?

The way that I imagine it (from a non-optician’s viewpoint) is like this:
Imagine holding up a tall glass (like this one) up in front of your eye. The ‘Cyl’ value is similar to the thickness of the glass, and the ‘Axis’ value is the angle at which you hold the glass in front of your eye.

Any thing else you want to know, just ask in the comments.

5 years ago to this day, I first registered Prescription Eyewear Ltd, which is the company that trades as Glasses Direct. On our birthday I thought I’d jot down 10 personally memorable points along the way:

• June 2004 – Launched from my bedroom at University of the West of England and expanded into my parent’s house in Gloucestershire.
• August 2004 – Daily Telegraph runs feature on what we were up to, jump-starting public awareness in the business and beginning a history of media interest in the savings at GD compared with the high street.
• March 2005 – World’s first Virtual Mirror launched, named ‘customeyes’, which was immediately featured on Tonight with Trevor Macdonald and we continued to develop over the following years and can now be seen on our product pages.
• November 2005 – Picked up the UK Shell LiveWire Award with Deidre Walker (our first Finance Manager) and my proud Mother in the audience (almost the entire team at that point!). A great stamp of approval from a fantastic organisation and a real testament to the great work the team had done. The business went on to win a number of other business awards, but this one stands out as the first.
• November 2006 – Gordon Brown talks about Glasses Direct as a symbol of UK entrepreneurship success in Enterprise Week speech. We are often asked to contribute and work with researchers for speeches, degree programs, MBA’s, etc and it’s an honour for our business to be used as a role model.
• September 2007 – Oriental themed Glasses Party on the lawn outside our office barn, at Charlton Park to celebrate first VC investment received. I remember signing the final investment documentation with one of my longest standing angel investors and mentors, Ian McCallum on a picnic table outside the tent. The total we have now raised in the company stands at about £16m.
• September 2008 – Management team recruited, including Kevin Cornils ex- CEO buy.at, and MD EMEA match.com and Howard Bryant, ex-CFO of ecommerce success figleaves.com
• March 2009 – With over 35 different designer brands on the site, designer frames now account for a significant proportion of our sales. We started purely own-brand with ambitions to sell every frame a customer could want. Due to our established position in the optical industry and the quality of our team who work with them, this is now looking possible.
• May 2009 – Double whammy: A hugely upgraded Home Trials offering goes live, allowing you to select up to 4 pairs to demo, and have them delivered to your door in a box, before you buy them. AND we glaze our first pair of glasses in-house using robotic machinery from Weco, in Germany
• May 2009 – With over 250,000 pairs of glasses sold, GD continues to pioneer what Marketing Week recently described as etail 3.0 along with a tremendous peer group of other companies breaking new ground in ecommerce.

Apparently 8 out of every 10 businesses fail in the first 5 years – we have done well to beat the statistics but we know we still have a huge amount of growth ahead of us. The journey so far has been a complete thrill and tonight I will be drinking to/with the team that I’ve been lucky enough to work alongside. Long may it continue.

Image from www.thesun.co.uk

About 16 million people in the UK suffer from hay fever – an allergy to pollen or fungal spores which causes sneezing and a runny nose and eyes. Fun, it isn’t.

Hay fever season typically lasts from May to August, but if you’re determined to make the most of this summer, read on. Here are five simple ways to pull the plug on irritating pollen…

1. Wear wraparound sunglasses and a broad-brimmed hat.

   “The close fit of wraparound sunglasses offers that crucial extra bit of protection for the eyes, forming an effective barrier between them and any pollen” says Glasses Direct’s Director of Product and registered Dispensing Optician, Phillip Meyer. A broad-rimmed hat makes a good back up.

   Check out a range of sunglasses here at Glasses Direct.

2. Avoid going out early morning and at dusk.

   There’s usually more pollen floating around at these times. Check out the pollen counts near you at bbc.co.uk/weather.

3. Keep windows and doors closed.

   “Make a pollen-free atmosphere by closing windows and doors and sitting still for 30 minutes – pollen will fall from the air, giving some respite” says Professor Jean Emberlin of the National Pollen and Aerobiology Research Unit, University of Worcester in a recent Asthma & Allergies supplement in The Guardian.

4. Take regular showers.

   To get rid of any pollen caught on your body and hair and reducing the risk of reaction.

5. Avoid places with high levels of air pollution.

   It can make symptoms worse, say experts.

Congratulatons to Nick Blatcher for being our second free glasses for life winner.

When we contacted him he had this to say:

“Thanks a lot, I have only ever won a box of Matchmakers at the school fete before, so this is brilliant.”

We’re so happy that we can bring this kind of joy to people and very much look forward to giving even more free glasses for life away over the next few weeks.

There’s two more weeks left to run in the free glasses for life competition which is drawn at noon every Wednesday, so if you want to win you need to enter the draw which you can do here

Don’t forget you can increase your chance of winning if you refer all of your glasses wearing friends … if they win, you win!!

Today we launched a fantastic new way of shopping using our Virtual Mirror tool.  Now you can upload a photo of yourself and see which glasses look best on you whilst shopping the site. Or a little tip, try shopping as a celebrity, hours of fun. Scroll to the bottom of this post for my celeb pic.

This is a huge improvement on our previous Virtual Mirror tool. You now upload your photo once and it stays with you throughout your journey (previously the mirror was on a separate page) – much better for choosing your perfect glasses!

Top tips on using the Virtual Mirror

1. Arrive at a product page and you’ll see a box with the glasses on a person’s face:

2. By mousing over you get a list of options:

3. Click on it and you’ll see this:

4. You can pick another photo, upload a photo or even take a picture of yourself if you have a webcam. Here’s our David testing it out for you:

5. Adjust it if necessary:

6. Et voila! There you are on screen!

And if you get bored of looking at your own face whilst shopping, why not try being a celeb for a day! Today I am mostly being Angelina Jolie.

You won’t find every pair of glasses modelled just yet, it’s a pretty complex process because unlike other technology, with our Virtual Mirror you can see your head wearing glasses at different angles.

COMING SOON: We’re also launching our Video Mirror technology shortly, a great new way of seeing in real-time how you look in glasses!

After a week of running the free glasses for life campaign and seeing a mass influx of entrants we held the first draw yesterday to pick the lucky winner.

We decided it was only fair and right that our prestigious leader Jamie Murray Wells should be the one to pick the winner so we set up the data and got him to press the “big red button” national lottery style with a fanfare but without the lights!!

The winner was picked and within 30 minutes Chris Simpson the Head of Marketing was on the phone to him and I don’t know who was more excited Chris or the lucky winner. Chris was extremely happy to be the bearer of this fantastic news, and why not, it’s not everyday you get to give someone something FREE for the rest of their life.

So to get to the point the first free glasses for life winner was Mr Seljeflot from London who was referred from our friends at 50Connect so congratulations to him from all of the Glasses Direct team, he was extremely happy as you can see from this quote

“I’m blown away by this – brilliant news.”

There’s three more weeks left to run in the free glasses for life competition which is drawn at noon every Wednesday, so if you want to win you need to enter the draw which you can do here

Don’t forget you can increase your chance of winning if you refer all of your glasses wearing friends … if they win, you win!!

It’s vaguely sunny outside and rather windy, but nonetheless I’m bringing you my Sunglasses of the day number 4! These wayfarer-style bright glasses look great as prescription sunglasses and temptingly, we’re offering you £5 off this style for today only!

Shown with a full grey sunglasses tint added

Shown with a full grey sunglasses tint added

They also look pretty cool as bold funky specs, all the celebs are wearing them