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Brick No139: The man who may make Specsavers rebrand
By Matt Weston, Thursday 7 April 2005 The Man Who Most Sunday mornings, I spend some time tearing articles out of the weekend papers. Quite often I pass Jo a section she's not read that has a hole running right through it. As often as not, the articles are for others, not me. I figure that, if I can connect new ideas and introduce leads to friends, suppliers and customers I don't only get the Ready Brek glow; I also generate goodwill a la Brick No108. Last week, I forwarded Andy Bell a write-up about Harrow old boy Jamie Murray Wells (21), and his new company Glasses Direct. (Andy built the Business Bricks website, if you didn't know.) I added the piece to my tear-outs because I wear contact lenses. And Glasses Direct plans to enter that market. I'll explain why I passed it to Andy in a sec. (He doesn't wear glasses or contact lenses.) A pair of £140 specs cost about £7 to produce The gist of the clipping was this: Jamie, an old pal of Prince Harry, set up Glasses Direct from his parents' spare room. He decided to go into the glasses trade when he discovered he had paid £140 for a pair of specs that cost about £7 to produce. A 1/20th. Glasses Direct exploits a legal loophole to undercut high-street specs retailers. Consumers have the right to pay £17.50 for an eye test from any optician, who then has to supply a written prescription. So, if you so choose, you can get a test from Specsavers or Boots but buy online via Glasses Direct. Prices start at £15 a pair. So far, Jamie has over 21,500 paying customers and is running at around 300 new orders a day. Specsavers, meanwhile, ape the way the record industry dealt with music downloads . . . (1) Boss Mary Perkins writes in her local Guernsey newspaper that Glasses Direct glasses don't meet required standards. (2) She retreats behind her press team who say: "We do not believe [Glasses Direct] threatens us because it is not the same as our business." The full story. Andy, meet Jamie The PR people behind Glasses Direct have more connections than a Meccano set. Jamie has had full write ups in The Telegraph and The Times. And if a thread pulls 156 heated comments on The Daily Hell bulletin board you must be doing something right. Apparently, this press attention has pulled 1.5 million visitors to the Glasses Direct website. But whereas every column inch has talked up Jamie as the upstart, a young Che, the people's champion, the man who might make Specsavers rethink its name; the Glasses Direct site is a bit, well, corporate. A far cry from the "revolutionary" message, it just looks like a site selling cheaper than usual glasses. Don't you agree? www.glassesdirect.co.uk IMO, there's a disconnection between the message the press has picked up on and the message the site gets across. It's completely understandable. Jamie has gone from zero sales to hero status in months. But if he can make that connection! If he can figure out a way to make the Glasses Direct site excite in the way the press stories excite, he'll convert far more browsers to buyers. Which is where Andy Bell comes in. How to fix Jamie's site After a couple of speculative emails and phone calls, Andy has lined up a speculative meeting with Jamie. To complement Andy's own stack of ideas, I thought I'd help him on his way by sharing two of mine: (1) Can The Canned Photos. The Glasses Direct site, like the Specsavers site uses canned photos. Not paying customers but paid models. Can them. Instead, get happy customers to send in self-taken photos of them in their new glasses. If they're blurry, wonky, amateurish, that's best. Put them on the homepage. (See Joi Ito's Random Faceroll.) List as many photos as you can get people to send in, alongside your testimonials: these shouldn't be from B.D., Mrs V. and Revd. M.J. List as many details as the writer will give you permission to use i.e. full name, occupation, town, street, frame chosen, saving made. And don't edit: print the testimonials in full. People aren't enthused by "As Seen On National TV". They're enthused when they see that other, real-life people are buying your specs (and that they're so plussed they send in snapshots and testimonials). (2) Fr*e Contact Lenses According to the Observer, Jamie's next move is to start supplying contact lenses. He plans to undercut the average high street price of £24 for 30 pairs by 50%. Instead: undercut the average high street price by 25%, not 50% (£18 for a monthly supply of 30 pairs, not £12). But, every time an existing customer introduces a new customer she gets £2 knocked off her monthly bill. So if she brings on 9 customers, she gets her lenses free. (After 9, you start paying her to wear lenses. Really.) This means that, for every new customer recruited this way, Jamie pays £2 a month "recruitment cost". In this case, this is a much better way of recruiting new customers than any affiliate scheme. (A Java Script tells me that "the affiliate page is coming soon . . .") We've come full circle. Tearing out articles to forward to friends and colleagues is a surprisingly powerful way to build a network. By the same token, a scheme that helps a friend save a friend money is far more powerful than a scheme that helps an affiliate make itself money. How to get your website critiqued All this talk of fixing websites reminds me . . . Last November, and in January, I ran batches of reader websites for you to critique: Tim, Sarah, Martin, Jay, and Shirley. Allena, Ben, Steve, Jason, and Matt. Jenny, Ken, Gary, Paul, and Julian. I thought I'd run the same experiment again next week. Only I guess now, it's not really an experiment. It works. Ken (from Brick No109) said: "What a brilliant response I've had from fellow Brickies - so far, 27 replies all offering good advice about my website. I only got one email from a company promoting their services without including any critique. I feel morally obliged to make a donation now, Mr Weston." So if you have a new, impending or broken site that you would like other Bricks readers to review for you, drop as many details as you can to this address. Note: I always get far too many critique requests to feature, so I can't promise you'll be included. But I AM open to bribes. Remember to sign up: back to top |
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