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India has more than 1 lac optical stores and the numbers are increasing in every single day. But the online visibility of these thousands of stores has not been as optimal as it’s supposed to be considering qualified opticians are running these stores.

While big giants of the industry are eyeing on for direct entry into the optical retail business, it’s not going to be easy for them as their current business is dependent on these stores for survival. This is may not be the case for other big markets of the globe but traditional optical stores still dominates the retail business space in India. But micro-management of these stores is still a major issue which needs to be address so that both delivery of service and product becomes more consumer friendly and matches with the aspiration and consumer behavior of our time.

The stores on the other hand also need to be enabled by giving them easy access for B2B purchase of optical goods by linking them with multiple suppliers all across India through single window.

But, the premise of these business opportunities was laid on the requirements of the ecommerce industry and those opportunities did not necessarily solve the larger issue of how the optical stores could be discovered.

Interestingly, startups are coming to the forefront to address this issue upfront, exploiting technological means to enable optical stores to be involved with the means of modern trading. One such startup is wearmyspex.com.  Launched in June 2019 by Mukut Sarma & Ashiq Ali, wearmyspex.com is aimed at enriching the shopping experience of user in tier I and tier II cities.

With a team of 8 people, the Ghaziabad-based startup functions as an offline store aggregator and a digital marketing platform for optical stores envisioned towards transforming mom-and-pop stores to a bricks-and-clicks model. It is inherently cashing upon the primary factor which has also majorly been a hurdle for the Indian consumers to shop online – the ‘Trust’ factor. Along with this consumer also need post procurement service, ‘look, feel & fit factor’ before making actual purchase of a product.

On wearmyspex.com, a consumer has an option to browse the available offers on nearby store and either pay online or explore the physical purchase experience. The small retailers, on the other hand, are enticed with the vision to increase their reach in their neighbourhood community as well as the prospects of increasing their sales and dominance in the community market.

Store locator as a means of adding more convenience to the fast-paced urban lifestyle is not new. There are already big established market players working on the same line. But they lack specialization and limited only to listing of stores. Wearmyspex.com has gone a step ahead by upgrading the whole supply chain to online by linking manufactures & supplier of optical goods with end consumer through the online & offline support of the local stores. It reduces credit exposure of suppliers in one hand and brings more footfalls to stores for retail on the other hand and thus strengthens & empowers business of both supplier & retailer. The initiative optimizes business for all stakeholders in the value chain and win-win for everyone.

Localized digital promotion of each optical store is one of the prime objectives of wearmyspex.com to generate more footfalls in store. It is done by giving easy and free access to upgrade their offline store to online optical store and than going for promotion of the store at the locality to drive customer to the store.      

No wonder this is a huge opportunity for a startup like wearmyspex.com! As part of the roadmap, wearmyspex.com now has more than 500 optical stores & 10 wholesale suppliers of optical frame, sunglasses, optical instruments & optical accessories from across the country. Very soon they are planning to have more than 10000 optical stores & 100 suppliers and making it a real optical market place for each stakeholder. The journey has just begun.