Helping customers discover the right glasses is a booming world enterprise, spawning giants like Warby Parker within the U.S. and Lenskart in India. In the Middle East, this market is producing its personal rising powerhouse: Eyewa.
Eyewa, based mostly in Dubai and Riyadh, sells a variety of eyewear merchandise, together with prescription glasses, sun shades, blue mild glasses, and call lenses, by a DTC e-commerce and retail platform throughout 5 Mideast markets.
Now, the corporate has raised $100 million Series C spherical. The spherical, led by world development investor General Atlantic, brings Eyewa’s whole funding to $130 million since its 2017 launch.
Founded by Anass Boumediene, Mehdi Oudghiri, and Abdullah AlRugaib – all former Bain & Company consultants – Eyewa initially entered the eyewear market as an e-commerce retailer for third-party manufacturers. However, the corporate quickly launched its personal manufacturers after figuring out unmet wants within the Middle East.
Between 2015 and 2017, co-CEOs Boumediene and Oudghiri led Foodpanda’s regional operations below Rocket Internet and DeliveryHero possession. Their expertise scaling the food-delivery enterprise – which they declare to have grown 50x in three years and brought to profitability – motivated them to begin their very own firm.
“After our time with Foodpanda, we were hooked on entrepreneurship and knew we wanted to start something of our own,” shared co-CEO Boumediene on a name with TechCrunch. “We wanted to find the right problem to solve, so we started exploring ideas and comparing challenges we saw across different regions.”
From delivering meals to promoting eyeglasses
The founders brainstormed 87 concepts, and after filtering choices with a listing of 15 standards and conducting a six-month analysis, they landed on the eyewear market, a vastly completely different trade from meals supply.
They found demand for eyewear was rising considerably, however the provide wasn’t maintaining. Myopia was rising within the area’s comparatively younger inhabitants (one examine exhibits that the prevalence of myopia and excessive myopia within the UAE is round 27%). In addition, native eyewear firms have been targeted on in-store gross sales, not often did any e-commerce, and their manufacturers weren’t reasonably priced or tailor-made to the mass market.
With no prior expertise within the eyewear trade, Eyewa began by promoting eyewear manufacturers, together with Ray-Ban, Gucci, Prada, and Johnson & Johnson, on-line for 2 years.
By then, it had sufficient knowledge on buyer habits, together with cart additions, web site searches, and buy patterns, to design and launch its personal in-house manufacturers. Now, Eyewa has 9 proprietary manufacturers for numerous preferences, from older clients looking for useful eyewear to youthful consumers in search of fashionable choices. Currently, 96% of Eyewa’s income comes from these in-house manufacturers, which, in line with the corporate, has been key to retaining costs reasonably priced for the mass market, together with smaller cities throughout Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman.
Eyewa markets its eyeglasses, even the prescription ones, as trend equipment, not like conventional retailers, who are inclined to deal with clients as sufferers, promoting costly manufacturers like Prada in sterile settings.
“We kind of turned around the way we look at the eyewear experience, where fashion is the thing that customers really care about from a choice perspective,” co-CEO Oudghiri commented on the decision. “So that’s what we focus on in the retail experience and the health care aspect, we take care of it. We’re going to give you very high-quality lenses and exhaustive eye tests, and we’ll make sure that you have the best health quality for the eyewear that you buy. But what we want to push in the retail experience is the fashion.”
Eyewa additionally retains costs low: In the Gulf states, Eyewa’s entry-level eyeglasses, together with lenses, are priced round $100, roughly 50% lower than related merchandise accessible in conventional shops.
