More than meets the eye

A first look at the eyewear market

To see the future of wearables, I said look to where jewelry has been worn. The places where people trust metal against skin is where compute inevitably will reside.

The categories are easily found. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_jewellery_types

Head/Hair -> AirPods/Beats
Arms -> Watch
Hands -> Rings
Ear -> AirPods
Neck -> Beats

My prediction has been more or less fulfilled. Today we wear Beats, AirPods, Apple Watch and (though not Apple) rings containing microprocessors. However, what is missing from this categorization is eyewear.

In How We Got to Now, Steven Johnson describes the reading lenses of medieval Europe as the first piece of technology “since the invention of clothing in Neolithic times, that ordinary people would regularly wear on their bodies.”

Though worn and labeled as apparel, glasses are treated as jewelry. Made from semi-precious, fine materials, premium branding and sold through bespoke retail, eyewear is granted a special status in our panoply of products.

Before we get into how Apple will fill this space, we should learn a bit about how the eyewear industry emerged and evolved.

Eyeglass frames often have luxury branding: Tiffany & Co., Armani, Brooks Brothers, Ferrari, Burberry, Tory Burch, Chanel, Jimmy Choo, Coach, Swarovski, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Kors, Versace, Miu Miu, Prada, Ralph Lauren and Burberry are all eyewear brands. There are also eyewear-only brands which define their own luxury, such as Ray-Ban, Oakley, Persol, Vogue, and Oliver Peoples.

They are sold through a carefully segmented set of retailers such as Sunglass Hut, Óticas Carol, LensCrafters, Vision Express, Apollo, Pearle, Générale d’Optique, Target Optical, Pearle Vision, MasVisión, Mujosh, OPSM, Bolon, Oakley, GrandVision.

Though eyewear includes non-prescription glasses, prescription lenses are also branded. Lens brands include Crizal, Essilor, Eyezen, Kodak, Optifog, Transitions, Varilux, Xperio and Shamir.

It may seem like a diverse and broad value chain but all these brands, retailers and lenses are property of one company, EssilorLuxottica.

It is the result of the 2018 merger two major conglomerates: Essilor (French) focused on lenses and acquirer of 250 companies and Luxottica (Italian) owning a combination of frame factories, designer labels and thousands of retail outlets.

At time of merger, Essilor had around 45% of the prescription lenses market, and Luxottica 25% of the frames. Combined they sell close to a billion pairs of lenses and frames every year, through 17,740 stores with a workforce of more than 140,000. They have around 1.5 billion customers, mostly in the premium or high-end of the market.

Since the merger, EssilorLuxottica continued its acquisitions with a set of prescription laboratories in South America and Europe, optician groups in Europe and US and Heidelberg Engineering, a German maker of optical coherence tomography (OCT) diagnostic instruments, confocal microscopy, and scanning lasers.

In July 2024, EssilorLuxottica bought US streetwear brand Supreme, expanding its brand portfolio beyond eyewear and lenses for the first time.

It also acquired Israeli startup Nuance Hearing indicating that it may introduce hearing aid technology into its lenses.

It also owns EyeMed, one of the largest vision insurance plans in the US.

There is something here more than meets the eye.

A lenticular species

Almost everyone wears glasses at some point in their lives. In developed countries, the rule of thumb is that around 70% of adults need corrective lenses. In Japan it's 75%. Including sunglasses, the penetration of eyewear is probably close to 90%.

We are at an unprecedented moment in the story of human vision – namely, the accelerating degradation of our eyes. For several thousand years, human beings have been operating mostly with unaided vision. But that is coming to an end. No one is sure why but across the world, we are becoming a species that wears lenses.

There are two things happening. First, there’s a largely unreported global epidemic of myopia, or shortsightedness, which has doubled among young people in a single generation. Scientists once thought myopia was mainly genetic, but about 10 years ago, it became clear that children’s upbringing was also harming their eyesight. The effect is most severe in east Asia, where myopia has always been more common, but the rate of increase has been worldwide. In the 1950s, between 10% and 20% of Chinese people were shortsighted, but now, among teenagers and young adults, the proportion is more like 90%. In Seoul, 95% of 19-year-old men are myopic, many of them severely, and at risk of blindness later in life.

Across the developing world, a slower process is underway as populations age, urbanize, and move indoors for work.

In 2013 a paper forecast that half the world’s population will be myopic by 2050 – almost 5 billion people. In the course of a single generation, worldwide, researchers have recorded a rough doubling in the number of people who become short-sighted as children.

The main reason, as far as anyone can agree, is a reduction in the time that they spend outdoors. Sunlight helps to moderate levels of dopamine, which in turn influence the development of the eye. Too much dopamine means eyeballs grow too long, and become oblong in shape, focusing light in front of the retina, rather than on it.

Eyewear history shows people don’t start wearing glasses when everything seems out of focus. Instead, they wear them to participate in new forms of entertainment and labor. The mass market for spectacles didn’t emerge when they were invented in 13th-century Italy, but 200 years later in Germany, alongside the exploding availability of printed works, because people wanted to read. The printing press created a new job-to-be-done, reading, for which glasses were ready to be hired.

Scale and Style

In 2012, Essilor first publicized the 2.5 billion statistic, highlighting the shift from outdoor living to indoor usage and the resulting demand for eyewear.

EssilorLuxottica, with its own designers, engineers, factories, supply depots, and retail outlets, currently has almost 18,000 stores and contracts with 100,000 opticians worldwide. This allows it to bring products to market faster and in greater quantities than its rivals, while also retaining a larger proportion of its profits.

Considering various colors and face shapes, EssilorLuxottica produces about 27,000 models. Its plants produce 400,000 frames daily.

During the 20th century, the eyewear business transformed a physical impairment into an opportunity to display style. In doing so, optical retailers learned that for something that costs only about $15 to make, customers are happy to pay 10 or 20 times that amount. The gross margins are 60% to 67% for high-volume, online, or budget retail, 67% to 75% for mid-range/acetate) and 75% to 85%+ for branded and premium materials.

History

The conditions that have allowed for the rise of Essilor and Luxottica are rooted in the way spectacles were sold. Until the end of the 19th century, you could buy a cheap pair of glasses – for reading or for distance – off the rack in any department store, or from a jewelry shop, or a guy in the street. Eyewear was a craft and unregulated. It was buyer beware. Eyeglass sellers in the 18th and 19th centuries were notorious for scams and faulty lenses.

The birth of the optometry profession around 1900 changed this. A new profession of respectable spectacle-sellers, similar to pharmacists, sought to standardize eye tests and restrict the sale of glasses to licensed professionals only. Their goal was to raise standards. However, making cheap, widely available product accessible only to a few authorized sellers increased prices, and the potential for new form of corruption.

The first opticians were disdained by ophthalmologists – proper doctors of the eye, who trained in hospitals and considered selling glasses as an unskilled trade. The first optometry course in the US was taught at Columbia University’s physics department because it was not allowed inside the medical school.

But the new professionals persevered and found new ways to protect their jobs. Across Europe and in the US, optometry laws and regulations were passed to control the prescription and selling of eyewear. Many of these had a quality of health assurance aspect, but they also had the effect of creating a highly protected marketplace. For instance, opticians fought against advertising which might reveal prices and allow comparison shopping.

The scams and bribes became legend. Lens and frame makers bribed practitioners to prescribe their products and investigations and convictions forced divestitures and value chain break-ups.

Into this space the components of EssilorLuxottica stepped in and began to consolidate the market. Luxottica has spent the last 30 years acquiring prominent elements of the optical business, including frames, brands, and retail chains. Essilor, has focused on acquiring lens manufacturers, instrument makers, prescription labs, and the science of sight.

The strategy for EssilorLuxottica is to obtain the power to decide how billions of people will see and what they pay for it. The company can screen populations and provide eyewear across the globe all the while controlling supply, prices, and margin.

New technologies such as automated optometry kiosks and online retailing that threaten independent opticians are sustaining to EssilorLuxottica and thus they are investing and acquiring.

Today humanity is watching the world through screens, in front of them, but not on their eyes. It seems only a matter of time before those screens become lenses. The same lenses that are now an essential product for almost everyone.

One more thing: Exactly one year ago, in July 2025, Meta acquired a minority stake in EssilorLuxottica with about 3% of the equity as part of its partnership with Ray-Ban. Bloomberg said that Meta had bought a stake worth around 3 billion euros ($3.5 billion) in EssilorLuxottica and is considering further investments that could build its holding to around 5% over time.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called it a "symbolic" gesture to cement their long-term partnership.