Who is luxottica

The company has also successfully partnered with leading companies such as Nikon to distribute specific technologies that enable each consumer's needs to be fully addressed. These brands make an important contribution to educating consumers about the importance of eye care. We carry this responsibility with us always and continue to answer the question with the introduction of groundbreaking ophthalmic and sun lens innovations.

EssilorLuxottica also has a long history of designing equipment and solutions used by opticians, optometrists and ophthalmologists around the world. This includes lens surfacing and coating equipment and instruments for refraction, diagnostic and imaging, measurement, edging and mounting tools as well as sales support services.

The vision and inventiveness of EssilorLuxottica has helped eyewear become a category on its own over the past few decades, evolving from a necessary device that improves vision to a desirable fashion accessory which enables self-expression and enhances self-confidence. The portfolio is rounded out by non-prescription reading glasses, including the brand Foster Grant.

Alongside the proprietary brands, the portfolio has over 20 licensed brands, including some of the most prestigious names in fashion and luxury.

EssilorLuxottica offers consumers around the world a superior shopping experience which strives for excellence both online and offline. A true omnichannel approach to distribution has enabled the magic of our stores to be replicated in the digital space, enabling visitors to enjoy everything from customization to an endless aisle of frames. This approach enhances the consumer experience by offering a connected experience across all customer touch-points. Once the deal was done, Del Vecchio promptly broke up US Shoe, whose roots went back to , until all that was left were the LensCrafters stores that he wanted in the first place, which he proceeded to fill with Luxottica frames.

Having its own designers, engineers, factories, supply depots and retail outlets — Luxottica currently has almost 9, stores and contracts with a further , opticians around the world — means it can bring products to market faster and in greater quantities than any of its rivals.

It also keeps a larger proportion of its profits as a result. In the factory in Agordo, I saw dual-armed robots pinning together the front and temples of Ray-Ban Wayfarers, and basket after basket of metal frames being dunked in a series of chemical baths to coat and colour them.

Glasses may appear to be relatively simple objects, but they involve between and manufacturing stages to produce. With its own designers, lasers and massive, quietly humming machines, Luxottica can take a pencil sketch to global production in about three weeks. Taking into account all the different colours and face shapes Japanese noses are not the same as Latino noses , Luxottica has around 27, models in production at any one time.

Its plants turn out , pairs of frames per day. I asked Striano if any other company came close. Although designers such as Pierre Cardin and Christian Dior had been experimenting with frames since the s, Del Vecchio saw a way to take their ideas, and more importantly, their labels, to a mass market.

In , he signed a licensing deal with Giorgio Armani, another self-made tycoon, who had started out as a window-dresser at a department store in Milan. The deal transformed the glasses game. Until then, consumers in Europe and America who wanted fancy spectacles had to rely on staid, industry names such as Zeiss, Rodenstock or Silhouette.

After the Armani deal, they could buy Prada, Gucci and Chanel, and they were willing to pay for it. By the early s, Luxottica salesmen supplying opticians in the City of London were making so much money that they were using chauffeurs to get around. People in the industry observe that taste in frames follows a roughly year cycle, from metal, to rimless, to acetate and back again, in which familiar spectacle shapes recur and then disappear.

Spectacle frames require a thousand barely noticeable design decisions, around the shape of the bridge, the thickness below the eyes, or the pantoscopic tilt how the angle of the lens meets the front of your cornea. The Leonardo had an unusual temple, in which a curving piece of wire had to be sandwiched between two pieces of acetate. Luxottica had made only for the entire world. The transformation of glasses from a medical device to a means of self-expression, like clothes or sneakers, has been a source of joy for millions of people.

But it has also obscured their original purpose, and complicated efforts to distribute them as easily as, say, mosquito nets or aspirin.

They were hugging us. The fusion of the fashion industry and the optical business is now regarded as complete. Until recently, eye-health charities and campaigners used to distribute thousands of pairs of secondhand glasses from richer countries to poorer populations that lacked them.

In , the World Health Organization advised them to stop — in part because people were refusing to wear outdated styles. The room contains every current Luxottica design, arranged on various tables and ranked in order of sales. It was snowing outside and Francavilla was wearing a thick blue cardigan.

One of the first things he did was to take my glasses off my face to identify the tortoiseshell acetate, which is known as Havana. His own glasses were a pair of rimless Ray-Bans with pink carbon-fibre temples. At the time, the label was washed up. During the negotiations, he promised to protect thousands of jobs at four factories in the US and Ireland. Three months later, he closed the plants and shifted production to China and Italy. Over the next year and a half, Luxottica withdrew Ray-Ban from 13, retail outlets, hiked their prices and radically improved the quality: increasing the layers of lacquer on a pair of Wayfarers from two to In , to the disbelief of many of his subordinates, del Vecchio decided that Ray-Ban, which had been invented for American pilots in the s, should branch out from sunglasses into optical lenses, too.

Banning rays from the sun? Ray-Ban is now the most valuable optical brand in the world. Francavilla joined the company in I asked him how a man with a small spectacles workshop in the Dolomites had come to bestride the global eyewear industry.

The appetite grows with eating. H ow did just two companies — one in frames, and one in lenses — come to dominate something as generic, as obvious, as glasses? The conditions that have allowed for the rise of Essilor and Luxottica are rooted, deep down, in the way spectacles are sold. Eyewear was a craft of tinkerers and inventors. It was the birth of the optometry profession, around , that changed things.

This was a new breed of sober, respectable spectacle-sellers — not unlike pharmacists — who wanted to standardise eye tests and to restrict the sale of glasses to licensed professionals.

Their aim, for the most part, was to raise standards. Eyeglass pedlars in the 18th and 19th centuries were notorious for scams and faulty lenses. But there was also another compelling reason to take a cheap, widely available product and put it in the hands of a few authorised sellers — and that was to make money.

The first opticians had a tough time of it. They were disdained by ophthalmologists — proper eye doctors, who had trained in hospitals and considered themselves above the tawdry trade in glasses. A remnant of this prejudice still holds: within the optical industry, optometrists are always being teased for their chippiness and self-importance.

But the new professionals persevered and, in a way, the story of optometry for much of the 20th century was of finding new ways to protect their patch. Across Europe and in the US, optometry laws and regulations were passed to control the prescription and selling of eyewear. For a long time, opticians fought all forms of advertising, for example, which might force them to spell out their prices and allow customers to shop around.

Limiting the number of glasses sellers gave the largest optical manufacturers opportunities to try and corner the market. This was when Essilor came on the scene. In , Essel and Silor, two French optical companies, merged and began sell aggressively into the US market.

Progressive lenses allow people who are both long- and shortsighted — typically older customers — to combine their prescriptions into a single, graduated lens. The early Varilux models were experimental and not everyone could adapt to them, but they were probably the most important innovation in eyewear since the invention of bifocals around the time of the French revolution. Lenses are the pixie dust of the optical business. Barely anyone knows what they are made of, how they are constructed and, especially at the high end, exactly how they work.

Probably not. But you prefer that badge to that badge, or the way they win hearts and minds. And when all else fails, Essilor — like its rivals, and like all wholesalers — uses financial incentives to keep its customers satisfied. They are not a ruthless company. But they get away with all this crap which in any other industry would be anti-consumer.

The arrangement suits Essilor and its clients pretty well. Even Luxottica executives are awed by this. A little bit like the Big Mac, right? Nobody knows how much lenses cost. Nobody knows. The company boasts of supplying between , and , stores around the world — three or four times as many as Luxottica.

If Luxottica has spent the last quarter of a century buying up the most conspicuous elements of the optical business the frames, the brands and the high-street chains then Essilor has busied itself in the invisible parts, acquiring lens manufacturers, instrument makers, prescription labs where glasses are put together and the science of sight itself.

The company holds more than 8, patents and funds university ophthalmology chairs around the world. In deals that rarely make the business pages, Essilor buys up Belgian optical laboratories, Chinese resin manufacturers, Israeli instrument makers and British e-commerce websites.

T he first rumours, imaginings really, of the two companies joining forces began more than a decade ago. The idea has an intuitive appeal — the satisfying click of lenses with frames — but there were considerable obstacles. The first was cultural. Luxottica, on the other hand, functioned more or less like a monarchy, with none of the management structures of most multibillion-dollar companies. The companies saw themselves differently too. It is all about domination. Oakley refused.

Jannard had founded Oakley out of the back of his car in According to Forbes magazine, at the end of their conversation, he said he hoped the two men would one day be friends. A few months later, Il Presidente swung into action. In November, Sunglass Hut stopped selling Oakleys. By that time, Del Vecchio appeared ready to retire. Under Guerra, Luxottica rationalised its manufacturing, shifting more production to China.

It also became more stable and predictable. The share price trebled. But according to several former executives who were close to Guerra, he was opposed to any deal with Essilor, seeing the company as a long-term rival. Guerra declined to speak with me. In , however, Del Vecchio came back to work.

He was But it became clear that Del Vecchio was worried about what would happen to Luxottica when he dies. Del Vecchio has six children from four marriages to three women he remarried his second wife, Nicoletta Zampillo, in but he has always insisted they will never succeed him.

According to several senior figures at Luxottica, Del Vecchio came to believe that folding Luxottica into Essilor was the best way for his work to endure, and informal talks between the two companies began. Guerra was soon forced out. After that, Del Vecchio went through four chief executives in three years.

In his early 80s, he is no longer the force that he once was. Subordinates told me that Del Vecchio can no longer work a full week and sometimes loses his place in meetings, while demanding to sign off on decisions as small as the floor-plans of new Luxottica stores.

Dozens of senior managers have left. O ver the coming decades, EssilorLuxottica will have the power to decide how billions of people will see, and what they can expect to pay for it. Public health systems are always likely to have more urgent problems than poor eyesight: until , the World Health Organization did not measure rates of myopia and presbyopia at all. The combined company can choose to interpret its mission more or less however it wants. It could share new technologies, screen populations for eye problems and flood the world with good-quality, affordable eyewear; or it could use its commercial dominance to choke supply, jack up prices and make billions.

It could go either way. The bigger picture takes a moment to discern. Until the s, and the rise of cheap manufacturing in China, Britain used to have hundreds of frame-makers up and down the country.

Today it has four.