Small steps, giant leaps
Sethi has a way of making his decisions sound obvious and the outcomes inevitable. He wanted to deliver cheaper glasses, so cut out the intermediaries and set up a factory to make his own. “I have no background in optical. My background is in tech and business. Whenever I look at a process, I think how to optimise it.”
The decision to run his own factory was one that took courage and it’s one for which he says he has enjoyed tremendous support from various quarters, including his business advisors at Barclays.
Sethi highlights a combination of inspirations for how he runs his factory, including a visit to a car factory in Liverpool (“it had fewer people working in it than the typical opticians”) and Michael Keaton playing Ray Kroc in the film The Founder.
Having launched with an already-lean process, over time Sethi has continually tried to automate unskilled processes. To remain as competitive as it is, the business can’t increase headcount as production volumes increase. So, he’s applied machine learning, automating stock reordering and using data from machines’ previous jobs to automate set-up. One customisation alone reduced a 20-minute job to two minutes.
Sethi clearly seeks inspiration from a wide range of sources, citing fast-food delivery apps as another example, “My biggest strength is that I’m not from this industry. I look at what’s being done outside it. The three-hour time limit and showing customers where their glasses are at every point in the process, I took from takeaway delivery apps. The minute you place an order for food, you’re kept up to date. Our customers can track their order, even when it’s placed in-store, from the moment they place it to the moment the glasses are delivered.”
Having faced plenty of scepticism from within the industry, Sethi is relishing proving naysayers wrong. “Traditional optometrists told me I was growing too fast, and I would close whenever I opened a new store. Then they asked me why people needed next-day glasses and didn’t see why I was offering free home trials.”
Home trials is Sethi’s idea to allow people to get glasses (without the correct lenses) delivered so they can try before they buy. It’s another example of him following the data.
“If you go online and search our reviews, we’ve got 4.8 on one site and 5 on another. All the reviews say, ‘I love the glasses. They did it. I'm amazed. I placed an order yesterday came in today’.”
Data shows that 45% of people using the home trial service buy glasses. “It means we absorb the shipping cost. We go by data and customer behaviour, instead of listening to traditional industry voices. If you focus on the data, it pushes you in the right direction.”
A self-funded business
Perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of the Specscart story is its lack of flashy external funding. Apart from some early grants and prizes from a local foundation and the university – £5,000 from The Albert Gubay Enterprise Award and £10,000 from the Venture Further Awards respectively – and some free retail space “on the rundown side of town”, the business has been self-funded.
The first £5,000 went on buying some samples, which were then sold, while the later £10,000 went on an eye-test machine, a vital part of any optometrist’s business. Beyond that, Sethi is rightly proud that the business has been able to be profitable and for these profits to be used to grow the business.
Perhaps because the business has been mostly self-financed, Sethi is ruthless focused on being careful with his cash, telling a story of sourcing second-hand equipment – still functioning perfectly – for £9,000 which would have cost £130,000 new. As he adds, “If you're prudent it can make a huge difference.”
A global vision
In terms of what’s next, there’s little sign those industry naysayers will be proved right. Sales are growing with the factory currently producing 200 pairs of glasses a day. With its machine-learning optimisation that could increase to 500 without much extra cost beyond raw materials.
He's also got plans to go global. The business already has customers all over the world and offers free shipping anywhere. It’s a great example of Sethi’s clear-eyed logic and long-term vision.
“We’ve shipped orders to 120 countries and don’t charge shipping. But it’s less than 1% of our orders. We got an order from Australia for £27 of glasses and we’ll lose £3 on it. But the reason for doing it is that at least someone in Australia is wearing our glasses, which will help when we launch there.”
This global vision is underpinned by cutting edge tech, with Sethi personally leading a team building an entire new ecommerce platform from the ground up, due at the end of the year. Again, he makes taking on this extraordinary challenge seem perfectly ordinary. “We’re working on a headless platform to make the world's best eyewear ecommerce website, which once it’s developed will be lightning fast. The tech we’re working on is used by some very big tech firms. My aims are high. I want to take over the world of glasses.”
