November 2025

Luxottica dominates the world of eyewear – the conglomerate make frames under licence for hundreds of big-name brands including Prada, Versace and Chanel. They bought Ray-Ban in 1999 and Oakley in 2007.

Luxottica has long been considered the enemy of independent eyewear, by retail opticians like myself, as well as smaller, independent frame brands.

They bought (and subsequently ruined) Oliver Peoples and Persol, which were our two best-selling brands between 2001 and 2010. I don’t stock either brand anymore. They swallow up independent brands, lower standards and make everything grey and miserable.

They merged with Essilor, the French lens giant, in 2017, and now own 18,000 chainstores including David Clulow, Sunglass Hut, LensCrafters and Vision Express, all selling the same generic shapes and models. 

The conglomerate had an annual turnover of over €26.5  billion in 2024. 

Essilor charge independents like myself something like three times what they’d charge their own opticians for their lenses. Luckily for me there are alternatives.

Pioneers in mass production, they result in sunglasses and prescription glasses assembled with average-to-poor quality raw materials, with a flimsy feel that fit poorly. Many of their products, most notably the higher end licenced brands such as Chanel and Tiffany don’t warrant their inflated prices as the material quality and construction standards are so poor. 

Their mass-market products are everywhere – in Lux-owned sunglass concessions in Selfridges and Harrods to Duty Free in every airport in the world and uninspired out-of-town opticians who have no idea. Their lack of design originality, unawareness of the term restricted-availability, shady made-in-Italy labelling and bully-boy tactics all contribute to me crowning them the Optical Overlord.

They parade their ugly, garish labels on their sides for sheep people who think that displaying a brand label on their sunglasses is cool.

There’s no soul to this company. Any passion for eyewear or eyecare would be wasted with them. Not a fan.

November 2025

We’ve teamed up with an independent frame maker in East London with many years of experience in crafting handmade and bespoke spectacle frames made from high-quality Italian cotton acetate. They can create any shape of frame in a multitude of colour options. 

For handmade buffalo-horn we use Hoffman, a company in Germany acknowledged as the industry leaders in horn frames. The hypoallergenic material is nearly half the weight of acetate and ethically sourced from Asian water buffalo.

We produce a 3D model on computer first to fine-tune the shape and then either produce a 3D-printed prototype or go straight into production.

Over the years we’ve found that using an existing ready-made frame as a basis for copying and modifying works best. 

We can adjust any dimension of the frame, including the bridge size, and length of the sides, to ensure the perfect fit.

We have a wide array of acetate and buffalo-horn samples to choose from.

Prices start from £795 per pair. 

Have I ever mentioned that I used to be a big shot in the film industry? I doubt it – I haven’t thought about this episode in my life for a long time…

It started in 1998 when I saw Sliding Doors at the Odeon Swiss Cottage. I found the central premise of what-if so fascinating that I nearly got run over whilst thinking about it afterwards. I would have loved to have read more about parallel lives, fate and and how seemingly small events can affect our future.

As someone who spent half the time in a film wondering where I’d seen actors before, it would be useful to have a programme for the film, just like at the theatre. Or at football. So why wasn’t there a programme for films as well?

My idea started to take shape. I enrolled the help of a recently relocated friend, Richard, so that we could turn my fledgling idea into a business. Like me, he had absolutely no idea how to start a publication. But that didn’t stop us.

I was 38 and had moved on from Eye-Tech in Soho. We formed a new company, unimaginatively named A&R Publishing, and took two desks in Primrose Hill’s Utopia Village.

The concept was that we would create one magazine per film, with articles and information specifically about that film, which would be given free to the customer at the same time as their cinema ticket.

I’m sure Richard wouldn’t mind if I described him as the gobby one in our partnership. He was (and still is) a very charismatic and loud Glaswegian. He arranged meetings with all these film people whilst I spent hours perfecting which font to use for our email. I’d never known anyone so convincing as him. Great if you’re on the same side of the negotiating table.

I fancied myself as the creative genius whose strength was, well, coming up with the idea in the first place but actually having no idea whatsoever what to do next.

All three parties were crucial – we couldn’t do anything without the cinemas on board. We needed the film distributors to supply us with their press kits, arrange interviews and, crucially, endorse us; and, of course, advertisers funded the business.

Armed with a mock-up of the magazine, now called INSIDE FILM, we had to convince each party that we had all of the others in place.

The cinemas would benefit as they could add value with the ticket; and the film companies would benefit from our team of journalists writing interesting articles which added kudos to the film by it being worthy of an INSIDE FILM.

The pitch to the advertisers was that they would know which film’s audience they were targeting, so it would be far more effective than generic print magazines.

We started with the cinemas. We were dealing with the heads of the cinema chains, not just some bloke in the box office.

We told them that the production companies loved the idea and would be happy participants. And, remarkably, we secured meeting after meeting with the heads of the film distributors and they were actually taking us seriously.

I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn’t used to so much bullshitting. Early on, in a meeting with Buena Vista, Disney’s distribution arm, we were discussing their upcoming film, A Bug’s Life.

At one point the Head of Bueno Vista asked me my opinion on the release date. Why the hell are you asking me?, I thought. “I haven’t got a clue. I’m an optician, for God’s sake!

We’d got Odeon on board. Their box office staff were trained to say “Here’s your ticket and here’s your INSIDE FILM”. The business started to take off – we were printing and distributing 40,000 copies per film across the country which were received well by all parties, including the cinema-goer. With well over 400 films released each year, we could pick and choose which to cover.

We went from renting two desks in a shared office to having our own office in Utopia Village. It was previously Mayfair Studios where hundreds of artists in the 70s and 80s recorded, including three of my all-time favourites, Bowie, T. Rex and The Who.

We went on a hiring spree. We took on an editor, as we thought at least one person on the team should know something about publishing, we took on a team (yes a team!) of sales people whose job was to convince advertisers to part with five grand per page. We hired writing staff and graphic designers. We decided we needed money and managed to blag it as a multi-million pound business and got huge investment.

We were going to exclusive screenings and premieres. There was even a fancy launch party at the Cannes Film Festival. 

As evidence of us getting a bit too big for our boots it was decided that we should conquer New York. Richard went first. I flew over a few days later at Richard’s behest as he’d secured a meeting with Miramax. Both brothers were present but best not to dwell on the Weinsteins. This was before they became notorious.

As we grew we were catching the eye of some big industry players and I was becoming aware that I didn’t have a role for myself other than swanning around as the company’s founder and attending every screening of a new film. I was happy to step down before I got booted out. After all, I still had a very large share of a soon-to-be colossal company. We had raised many millions in investment and my shares were worth a good few million too. On paper at least.

In the early 1990s, no one really knew what the Internet was. OK, Tim Berners-Lee did, and maybe a handful of others too, but I didn’t. And I’m willing to bet that you didn’t either.

By the end of the century there was an increasing awareness of this thing called the World Wide Web and a new breed of marketing people wanted a piece of ‘new media’. Advertisers were throwing their budgets into websites, despite the fact that no one had a clue what was going on.

We’d gone from the hottest ticket in town to dinosaurs overnight. Our advertising revenue went from £70,000 per issue to a grinding halt and by the new millennium the dream was over.

And that was when I realised that I needed to return to what I knew and build something with proper foundations. Even though I’d been a local for years beforehand, having the INSIDE FILM offices in Primrose Hill cemented my love of the area and now there’s nowhere else I’d like to be.

So what did I learn? As in Sliding Doors, timing is everything. Had I come up with the idea of INSIDE FILM a few years earlier, there’s every chance we wouldn’t know each other and you wouldn’t be reading this. (Or be able to read this without my help!)

Ever since watching Back to the Future, I’ve fancied myself as a maverick inventor. In 1998 I started a film magazine, which I’ll come back to in a future email. In 2007, I came up with an idea to create an instrument that would revolutionise measuring the position of the eyes within a pair of glasses.

Typically these measurements are taken using rulers and marker-pens with a shocking lack of accuracy. Precision is essential for success with varifocals and high-prescription lenses. Poor measurement leads to inaccurate placement of the lenses and is responsible for the vast majority of varifocal intolerances, which has given varifocals a bad rap over the years.

My idea was to create an instrument that would take a digital photo and have an integral computer do some clever processing magic. I called it the Centrometer – a portable, handheld device that Steve Jobs would be proud of. How difficult could that be?

I put together a business plan and pitched it to a few people. After just a few weeks I struck lucky with a friend of a friend who fancied a new challenge. First hurdle achieved – without having to appear on Dragon’s Den. I estimated that we’d need around £150,000 for development.

We engaged a product development company that I worked with for a few years and eventually received a shiny prototype that I took, with some trepidation, to Specsavers Head Office, to test the market. I shouldn’t have worried – they wanted multiple units per store. If they wanted it, surely every optician in the world would want one too? We’d made it! All our hard work was paying off and we were close to success.

One minor problem – we couldn’t make it actually work. The answer to my earlier question “How difficult could that be?”  is “extremely”. My dreams of success faded away as we were beset with one problem after another and the costs of development escalated as the months rolled by. My second home would have to wait.

In 2013 we pulled the plug, having spent close to £1.5million of my investor’s money.

Meanwhile, Carl Zeiss, the world-renowned lens and optical instrument company, were developing their own version of MY idea, called the iTerminal. ZEISS are responsible for the optical technology in the Hubble telescope and the only optical company to have won an Oscar (for cine lenses used in films). With their 150 years of experience in the optical instruments world and very deep pockets they were probably in a better postion to put together this instrument than I was.

ZEISS also happen to produce the world’s finest spectacle lenses and optical instruments so we now use Zeiss lenses as standard. Their lenses can be optimised to the point that we offer a money-back guarantee on progressive lenses.

And as I’m somewhat obsessed with the issue of perfect fitting and lens placement, I’ve now got my own ZEISS iTerminal, (which I suspect is more accurate than the Centrometer would have been had it worked) and apparently took many tens of millions of dollars in R&D, so how I thought I could come up with a better solution at a fraction of the cost, is beyond me! 

We’re successfully using the iTerminal for all new glasses and I barely feel any resentment towards it.