Vanity, Thy Name Is Woman
by Revolver
And it starts young, let me explain. The 1990’s brought a renaissance of sorts in female fashion eyewear, following a long era of oversize frames, plastic and gaudy to begin with that slowly morphed into plainer metal styles but still large. As a result, younger new glasses wearers avoided them for a variety of reasons none the least of which they screamed “old” and even with newer lenses such as polycarbonate had thick edges in the higher minuses.
But in the 90’s there was a return to small, simple, metal frames harkening back to the hippie styles of the 60’s and early 70’s. Even though they were much more appealing to the younger set, soft contact lenses had been perfected and teenage females with their first corrections, almost always minus, went directly to contacts and would not be seen wearing glasses. Period.
But that did not deter me from starting a very successful boutique optical shop just across the main street from a medium sized state university in a somewhat funky campus shopping center. The customer potential was there because of the large number of female faculty and staff, graduate students, and the hipper undergraduates who actually felt glasses were part of being a student.
Before becoming an optician, I took an undergraduate degree of a non-technical nature which was a great learning experience but left me ill-prepared to make a living. Having worked part time for a local optical manufacturing lab during school I knew the basics of opticianry, but was fascinated by the non-technical aspects and decided to make that field my future. After graduation, while working full time in the lab and attending night classes at the local vo-tech, quickly attained an Associate’s Degree in optical dispensing and passed the board exams to become American Board of Opticianry Certified and licensed by our State. Floating a small loan from relatives allowed me to open my store in 1990 and it was a success from the start, attracting the local carriage trade plus the university habitués.
And it was fun. I apprenticed and trained local residents and even some students so that I could take the time to attend the large optical trade shows in New York City, Atlanta, Chicago, and my favorite, Las Vegas. Yes, those expositions offered continuing education credits and the latest in hi-tech equipment but more important to my business they were fashion shows. The very newest trends in frames were showcased, but also the budget priced companies competed for our type of business which enabled a small operation like mine to offer a large selection of frames without tying up an inordinate amount of capital in inventory.
But a few years later something inexplicable happened, and therein lies the story. It was only a few weeks into the fall semester, when we suddenly experienced an almost overwhelming, but very welcome, surge in business. Suddenly we were inundated by undergraduate co-eds, all of them wanting not one but two pairs of glasses: one for daily wear and one for sunwear. And they wanted them now. That was no problem as technology had advanced to the point that for single vision lenses all one needed was a small automatic edger, a supply of the most common finished lens blanks in a variety of prescriptions, and some time. The nearest one-hour place was quite a distance from campus and public transportation wasn’t available, so they had no problem waiting over night for their eyewear. My days became filled with frame styling, measuring, and dispensing and my evenings (when the shop was closed) were spent edging lenses and inserting them in the frames. And the timing was perfect as I had just returned from the big Las Vegas show and on a hunch had made a large purchase of stylish but inexpensive trend setting frames. In addition, frame purchases like that make you immediate friends with the vendors so it was no problem to replenish the supply of the popular frames sold that day overnight via the several national delivery services. Likewise, the most common lens blanks were received the next day.
The surge started on a Monday, right about noon, and it didn’t take long to discover why it was happening. One particularly talkative customer said she was part of a long line at the campus health clinic that morning, with most of the girls sporting slightly bloodshot eyes…and not because of the usual weekend partying that had taken place. It seems like there was an epidemic of pinkeye going around, to be more precise viral conjunctivitis, and even those who hadn’t yet contracted it were aware of it and wanted to be checked. Now, it doesn’t make sense to immediately run to an optician because after all, not only wasn’t I a doctor I didn’t even have one available to do refractions and write prescriptions. No, each and everyone of them were contact lens wearers and had been advised not to wear their contacts for at least two weeks. Some had valid prescriptions and some didn’t, those who didn’t were directed to a nearby Doctor of Optometry.
In that era of burgeoning soft lenses, a huge majority of young college bound ladies, nearly all of them myopes, totally bypassed eyeglasses when they needed a correction, went straight to contacts, and never even owned a pair. Some of the younger ones had their eyes examined before heading off to college and had a fresh prescription that I was able to fill almost immediately, and the word of my services spread faster than the pinkeye itself had. And while that category was being fitted, the ones who hadn’t been refracted in years scurried to the nearby O.D., got examined and then headed to my store. Many of their stories are memorable, to say the very least.
My first customer that Monday was a mere Freshman, a delightful young lady, who had gotten her first correction in 6th grade. She had gotten glasses along with contacts at the insistence of her parents, but said they went into the case the day they were dispensed and had never been worn, at least in public. She was wearing them and well, the best thing you could say was they were 5 years out of date. Worse yet, they were –1.00 sphere and barely made a dent in her current contact lens prescription she’d received during her exam a few months prior, just before she left for college, of –2.75. Fortunately for her, she also had a current spectacle prescription and as this was before my shop was overwhelmed had time to edge her lenses on the spot and 2 hours later she was fitted with an attractive pair of daily wear glasses and a very fashionable pair of sunglasses. She was thrilled with being able to return from a world of blur and I am certain she quickly spread the word back in her dormitory that my hitherto humble shop was the place to go.
Another case was ever more extreme, after getting the information from her I wondered how she was even able to find the store. Like the first one, she’d gone directly into contacts at age 13, but had never even owned a pair of glasses as she hated them because they would “spoil her looks”, and was angry that she now had to wear them. But she had little choice this time, she’d just been refracted, at age 21, and the rx she presented was OD –4.75 and O.S. –4.50 with a half diopter of cylinder in each eye. She had to press her face right up to the mirror to see her frame selection, took the first pair that looked reasonably well, and then selected sunwear but in only a #2 tint so she could wear them indoors as much as possible. By then I was swamped and wasn’t able to get her jobs done until the next morning when I found her camped on my doorstep. She wore the sunwear out of the shop and I doubt that the clear pair got very much use, she was downright ashamed of being a myope.
The stories go on and on, suffice it to say all of them involved either never having worn glasses because their first and only correction was contacts and/or those with very old and woefully weak eyeglasses because they would get their contact lens prescriptions updated annually and ignore spectacles.
Business was so good I was able to divert fairly large sums of money into investments, but there were also some unexpected long term effects that were most favorable. As years went by, the word of good service coupled with fashionable frames at good prices was passed from class to class, from sorority house to sorority house and before very long my customers became alums and kept coming back. And, after the epidemic passed, there were several new customers appear that had borrowed their friend’s old low minus glasses and were thrilled with the clarity, got their eyes examined and found they were myopic because of the demands of academia, and became happy and loyal customers.
They weren’t the only happy ones, life became very good for me. As the investments flourished I was able to start a small chain at other similar universities in our conference which became a larger chain near other major conference schools. The one hour optical chain business exploded across the country, I was courted by and eventually bought out by a mega chain, and kept only my original shop just as a reminder as to how it all started. Of course, being an aficionado of optics I also wanted to have an excuse to continue to frequent the big optical expositions across the country and in Europe.
During the first two decades in which the business was my life, I lived frugally. But now, with more money than I could spend in a lifetime and the time in which to enjoy it, I became determined to live well. Yes, a spectacular home, luxury sports cars, a private aircraft, and several condos in the U.S. plus my favorite one in the Bahamas were part of the equation. But my favorite play toy almost immediately became a 54 foot Burger motor yacht. And everyone who has ever been around boats knows the old saw that the two happiest days in a boat owner’s life are the day he buys it and the day he sells it. I personally have not experienced selling it and hope I never will, but there is also one other happy day, the day you select a name for your yacht. Such names are sometimes whimsical, sometimes with a special meaning. So in that vein, I named mine Pinkeye.
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