Serving to customers discover the right glasses is a booming world enterprise, spawning giants like Warby Parker within the U.S. and Lenskart in India. Within the Center 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 get in touch with lenses, by a DTC e-commerce and retail platform throughout 5 Mideast markets.
Now, the corporate has raised $100 million Collection C spherical. The spherical, led by world progress investor Normal Atlantic, brings Eyewa’s complete funding to $130 million since its 2017 launch.
Based by Anass Boumediene, Mehdi Oudghiri, and Abdullah AlRugaib – all former Bain & Firm consultants – Eyewa initially entered the eyewear market as an e-commerce retailer for third-party manufacturers. Nonetheless, the corporate quickly launched its personal manufacturers after figuring out unmet wants within the Center East.
Between 2015 and 2017, co-CEOs Boumediene and Oudghiri led Foodpanda’s regional operations beneath Rocket Web 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 start out their very own firm.
“After our time with Foodpanda, we have been hooked on entrepreneurship and knew we wished to start out one thing of our personal,” shared co-CEO Boumediene on a name with TechCrunch. “We wished to search out the appropriate drawback to unravel, so we began exploring concepts and evaluating challenges we noticed throughout totally different areas.”
From delivering meals to promoting eyeglasses
The founders brainstormed 87 concepts, and after filtering choices with an inventory of 15 standards and conducting a six-month analysis, they landed on the eyewear market, a vastly totally different business 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 research exhibits that the prevalence of myopia and excessive myopia within the UAE is round 27%). As well as, native eyewear corporations have been targeted on in-store gross sales, not often did any e-commerce, and their manufacturers weren’t inexpensive or tailor-made to the mass market.
With no prior expertise within the eyewear business, 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 in search of purposeful eyewear to youthful patrons on the lookout for fashionable choices. Presently, 96% of Eyewa’s income comes from these in-house manufacturers, which, in keeping with the corporate, has been key to conserving costs inexpensive 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 likely to deal with clients as sufferers, promoting costly manufacturers like Prada in sterile settings.
“We sort of rotated the best way we take a look at the eyewear expertise, the place trend is the factor that clients actually care about from a alternative perspective,” co-CEO Oudghiri commented on the decision. “In order that’s what we deal with within the retail expertise and the well being care facet, we care for it. We’re going to offer you very high-quality lenses and exhaustive eye exams, and we’ll just remember to have the very best well being high quality for the eyewear that you simply purchase. However what we need to push within the retail expertise is the style.”
Eyewa additionally retains costs low: Within the Gulf states, Eyewa’s entry-level eyeglasses, together with lenses, are priced round $100, roughly 50% lower than related merchandise out there in conventional shops.
Scaling its omnichannel expertise
As an e-commerce platform, Eyewa solely served clients who already had prescriptions and knew the glasses they wished. However that’s not precisely a mass market. So it started opening retail shops in December 2020 as Covid lockdowns slowly lifted.
The transfer allowed it to achieve a broader buyer base, as most eyewear consumers nonetheless want in-store experiences to attempt on frames and full their purchases. This additionally allowed Eyewa to personal the total buyer journey by offering eye examinations, which may solely occur in bodily shops outfitted with optometrists and examination rooms.
Eyewa raised a $21 million Collection B from a number of traders, together with Nuwa Capital and Endeavor Catalyst, in 2021 to scale this effort, and since then, it has grown to 150 shops, all wholly owned and operated — no franchises. The startup, which now employs 1,300 individuals, claims to be the most important eyewear model in Saudi Arabia by retailer rely and the fastest-growing eyewear retailer globally.
To place this progress into perspective: world benchmarks like Warby Parker took seven years to develop from their first retailer to 100, and Lenskart in India took about six years to realize the identical milestone.
“We’re the quickest rising globally, however even throughout classes within the GCC, no different retailer in some other vertical did one retailer to 100 in lower than 4 years. So we actually executed tremendous quick,” Boumediene remarked.
Boumediene declined to reveal how a lot eyewear the corporate has bought since its launch however did say Eyewa is worthwhile and rising at over 50% year-over-year in revenues. The corporate intends so as to add no less than 100 extra shops throughout six international locations, together with Qatar, its subsequent market, in 2025; it would additionally open a manufacturing facility and success centre in Riyadh subsequent quarter, stated the manager.
With this spherical, Normal Atlantic joins a rising record of U.S. traders deepening their presence within the GCC by backing startups and establishing native groups, after receiving capital from the area’s sovereign wealth funds.
“It appears there’s a whole lot of newfound world curiosity within the area. We’ve had the VC ecosystem develop within the final 5 years, and lots of investments occur in early stage,” commented Mehdi. “Nevertheless it’s nice to see now extra established progress and personal fairness funds beginning to have a look at the area and the likes of Normal Atlantic coming, and hopefully many extra that can observe.”
Badwa Capital and Turmeric Capital additionally participated within the spherical.