Luxury eyewear? High-end eyewear? Are you folks at 20/20 losing your minds? What’s all this hypo-lux stuff doing in this October issue?
OK. Here’s the new plan: Back to bad basics. I’m going to be very detail specific even giving you a big tip on saving money with your store signage at the end.
• Salvage a small salad bowl from home. Fill it up with a few boxloads of paperclips, used safety pins, salvaged twisties and a roll or two of clear mending tape. This will be your complimentary repair center for anyone that comes back to your shop with the cheap, junk eyewear you now intend to dispense exclusively. Play up the oversized, jewel-like quality any assortment of these fixes adds to the eyewear including the near-invisible nature of the tape for both temple AND bridge repair.
• Have a trunk show. No, not of the fashion runway, brand-exclusivity or guest celebrity variety. No, what you need to do is find an old trunk in your attic or basement and dump all the junk eyewear you’ve been storing up for years into this trunk. Determine a price bottom ($2.99) and ceiling ($3) and stand outside the door of your shop yelling “Trunk show!”
• Become the go-to specialist in no-frills lens add-offs. No AR. No coatings of any kind. No variety of materials. No progressives. Absolutely NO progressives. Push the retro look of bi-focals. And tri-focals with special attention given to lines zig zagging across eyeballs and ALWAYS make a point that YOUR practice specializes in no adapting issues OR chatty solutions.
• Sun: None. Why bother? There are plenty of vendors at freeway rest stops selling counterfeit brand sunglasses with fashionably colorful lenses. And if your patient wants something more, direct them to a sport store or a department store where they can get some shades without the hassle of any professional optical specialist mumbo-jumbo.
• Alter your store sign. I’m sure it says “optical” somewhere in its title. Change it to “floptical.” Wasn’t that easy? And you can now use this same sign as you move from location to location in a valiant attempt to avoid having any loyal patient/customers.
NOW you are truly living the life of an anti-lux floptical professional.
