The world’s largest online eyewear seller, Coastal Contacts, is rebranding to be known as Clearly worldwide and plans to roll out a transformation in the weeks ahead.
The move unites the company’s many country-specific brands under a common name and highlights how the company has evolved since April 2014, when founder and then-CEO Roger Hardy executed the sale of what was a public company to French eyewear giant Essilor for $430 million.
The company’s Canadian brand, Clearly Contacts, will simply be known as Clearly whereas its American brand will be Coastal by Clearly, Clearly CEO Roy Hessel told Business in Vancouver in an interview May 11 at his East Vancouver headquarters.
“It’s not just about dropping the word ‘contacts,’” Hessel said.
“The rebranding, at its essence, its heart, really manifests and expresses our global vision.”
The company’s European brand, Lensway, will become Lensway by Clearly while its Japanese brand, Contactsan, will become Contactsan by Clearly.
It is unclear when or if the Clearly brand will eventually be the exclusive brand used worldwide.
Hessel said that the company’s focus going forward will be much more to educate consumers than to simply try to get them to buy products using price as the motivating factor.
Prices will not rise, he said, but there will be more educational videos and other tools on the website.
Having more on-site education will in turn spur sales, he said.
“The big change I want to communicate is that we’re going from being narrowly focused just on a price arbitrage with the market to being around global vision correction – how do we address it and what do you need to know about your eyes,” Hessel said.
One new partnership is with Kodak.
That pact with the former photography giant means that Clearly can offer Kodak's lenses and coatings so that Clearly's customers can protect their eyes from so-called “blue light,” which is largely emitted by bright screens on devices and computers.
Protection from blue light is not widely sought in North America but Hessel said it is common in Japan, said Hessel.
“That is one of the things that we have that is unique,” he said. “You wont find those lenses at other online channels or even eye-care practitioners.”
No future brick-and-mortar stores are planned but Hessel said that they are possible in the future.
His reason for pausing that rollout is that he belives capital is better spent fueling online sales.
All of Clearly’s 400 B.C. employees work out of the company’s Virtual Way head office, which includes a manufacturing facility and a new office that the company moved into little over a month ago.
Only three employees work in the U.S. whereas about 100 work in Sweden.
Pre-acquisition, the company had floated the idea of opening a manufacturing facility in Memphis because that is FedEx’s hub but Hessel has no such plans.
“Vancouver is not ideal for running any global company,” he said. “It’s not the ideal place for time zone and not ideal for access but there’s one thing in Vancouver that’s hard to replace and that’s human talent. There is a highly educated, very versatile, multi-language environment. The richness of the talent pool here overcomes all the other challenges that we have.”
Virtually all of Clearly's manufacturing is in Vancouver although some is also done in China and in Thailand.
Another change at Clearly is the zeal with which Hessel wants to work with the industry.
The pre-acquisition company battled lawsuits , such as one in 2007, when the College of Opticians of B.C. successfully argued that Coastal Contacts was breaking the law by failing to require that customers provide prescriptions and by failing to use eye-care professionals in its dispensing process.
The B.C. government then changed the law to allow the company to continue its operating practices.
“We have completely changed the approach of the company to the industry,” Hessel told BIV. “We see ourselves as an integral part of the industry and that our efforts are designed to increase awareness and to collaborate with the industry. So instead of competing with eye-care practitioners, we want to collaborate and become the company that increases awareness and provides value for the industry as a whole.”
