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.
Congratulations on the 5th. birthday! And how it brings back memories of the early days of the company. It seems only yesterday that here at Pond Farm, the rooms were full of noise and activity – and a great deal of laughter – with eager gap year students on the telephone, others sitting on the floor as there were not enough chairs and tables and addressing envelopes by hand; cables and wires festooned and running everywhere all over the house (mostly just below knee height), the frequent sighting of expert uni. students from eastern Europe Jamie had met in Bristol who were programming; Alison, mother of the proprietor, departing on another trip to PC World to buy yet another computer while I made sandwiches and tea and occasionally asked nervously if we had got anyone yet to take an interest in the accounts! They were exciting and anticipating days, full of ‘my God, it might just work’ and ‘what next?’. At that time, many pitfalls and dangers lay ahead and they were surmounted then, as they are now, by enthusiastic professionalism by everyone at the company: Jamie is lucky to have every one of you and of course I am very proud of him and all the exciting recent news about how Kevin is taking the company forward. Everyone involved has the right to feel proud that we won through and continue forward to new adventures – best wishes and well done!
I will never forget the first day I met Jamie and the then small Glasses Direct team, it’s been a fantastic journey so far and long may it continue. Amongst my favourite memories are; giving names not numbers to our first own brand glasses, moving our office and team to London for the first time, being voted a brand to watch by Superbrands and meeting my first GD customer randomly in the street in Nottingham!
Like Carole, I will never forget the day I started working for Jamie at Glasses Direct (4 years ago). Over the years things have changed so much and some times it is hard to believe just how far we have come since being in the barn in Malmesbury! Well done Jamie and team GD for getting us to where we are now!
A belated happy birthday Jamie,hope you have a healthy and happy,and sucessful year to come.I think your career has been amazing,and everyone I know,I tell them about GD.Oddly, some people still get theirs in Optical Express.I think its because you have to go to the Optician to get the presription,they aare under pressure to get their glasses there.The staff are over friendly,but change when you tell them ,you only want the prescription ! They are also loathe to give you the PD measurement.Being disabled with heart problems,and entitled to a free eye test,I feel if I pay for one,there is no way they think I`m getting something for nothing! Maybe someone will come up with an idea of a small place you can just get your eye test,and thats it! Good Luck for the future,Miriam ~
Miriam – Thank you for your kind words and your help promoting our service. Jamie