MASON, Ohio—Luxottica Group’s (NYSE: LUX) Luxottica Retail division plans to market its EyeMed Vision Care managed-vision operations more aggressively this year, Kerry Bradley, Luxottica Retail’s chief operating officer, said last week. Plans include the company’s first direct-to-employee marketing program, launching this year.

“We’ve decided to really unleash EyeMed and get competitive in the market,” Bradley declared.

Speaking last week during Luxottica’s Investor Day at Oakley’s headquarters in California, Bradley said EyeMed started this year with 23 million funded insured lives, up 8 percent over the same time in 2007. “And we expect 2009 to be a record year, based on early results,” Bradley said. He characterized EyeMed as the second-largest provider of managed vision plans.

EyeMed has established relationships with major insurance players such as Aetna, Humana, Wellpoint and others, and is also selling vision plans directly to employers such as the state governments of New York, Indiana and Illinois as well as American Express, Verizon, JP Morgan and others. In addition, the company is offering vision discounts to members of AAA and AARP through exclusive relationships with those groups, and is adding discount eyewear plans (generally offering a 30 percent discount) to HMOs with insured eye exams, Bradley said.

This year, EyeMed is also working with some of its employer clients to promote the concept of vision care to those companies’ employees. In a new program just rolling out, teams of EyeMed “field managers” will meet with employees to inform them about their vision benefits; more than 1,000 site visits are planned, Bradley noted.

“At one location, we booked 19 exams for a Pearle Vision store on the spot,” he said. “We’ll do more of that.”