In 2003, Bruce Jeffreys co-founded Australia’s first carsharing company, GoGet. Today, via new venture Dresden Optics, he is reinventing the way prescription eyewear is manufactured and sold and hopes the brand’s innovative perspective will make quality, affordable glasses accessible to anyone, whether they live in Melbourne or Mumbai.
It’s a bright autumnal afternoon in Sydney’s Potts Point and Bruce Jeffreys is in the throes of renovating his second optometry store. It’s less than a year since the launch of Dresden Optics and he has just decided to move the new shop’s opening day forward by three weeks, despite the fact it will still be a work in progress. “We’ll just bring an eftpos machine in and start selling a portion of the range; that way our customers can see us evolve,” he says with a grin. It seems that following the conventional path is not really his thing.
Dresden officially arrived last July when the first retail outlet opened its doors in Jeffrey’s home suburb of Newtown. Offering an innovative alternative to traditional eyewear, it’s already shaping up to follow in the footsteps of his first startup, GoGet CarShare, which today boasts more than 2,000 cars across five Australian cities.
Dresden’s Newtown store is selling upwards of 300 pairs of glasses each week, a third shop will hit Melbourne’s Fitzroy later in the year and more are on the cards. Meanwhile, the brand’s value-driven approach to design and manufacturing is enabling a raft of innovations, including the launch of a new online platform to facilitate the integration of eye health.
A modular system
So what is it about Dresden that’s capturing the attention of Australia’s optically challenged?
For starters, unlike other eyewear, Dresden’s range isn’t made up of individual styles. It’s a fully modular eyewear system with one universal frame design in four sizes. “Everything is interchangeable, the lenses pop in and out, the arms pop on and off, it comes in hundreds of colours, and it’s incredibly durable,” explains Jeffreys.
Customers can walk in with a prescription, or see the in-house optometrist to get one, and walk out in as little as 10 minutes with a pair of Sydney-made glasses for $49, including quality lenses from German optics manufacturer Carl Zeiss Vision. A set of five costs $169.
Frames are recyclable and since settling on a custom injection moulding process, the team at Dresden has trialled everything from milk bottle tops to marine waste and car parts. These days, the bulk of the range is moulded from a tough recyclable nylon – as Jeffreys demonstrates by bending the arm of his glasses almost 90 degrees; hence the 10-year-no-questions-asked warranty on all frames.
Born from frustration
Jeffreys says the brand comes as a response to the frustration he felt every time he lost or broke his glasses, and to what he sees as the industry’s shortcomings. “I think the current eyewear industry is really influenced by Italian fashion sensibilities, which are all about over-priced, impractical stuff that goes out of fashion and is not made to last,” he says.
He started work on Dresden in earnest about two years ago after finding a worthy partner in the “equally myopic” designer Jason McDermott. Resolved in their mission to create a more functional, affordable product, the pair began building a multi-skilled team (all glasses wearers) to make it happen.
They sought inspiration from traditional German values of design and manufacturing, where they saw a more direct connection between the making of a product and the person it’s intended for – and the name Dresden pays homage to this. “We admire how Germany has maintained its traditions, yet has a hypermodern edge,” he says.
With these values in mind, a commitment to quality and innovation and a desire to be as close as possible to the manufacturing process have been fundamental in shaping the brand. The team also relies on a hefty dose of Australian pragmatism to realise its ideas.
“We are bringing an Australian/German perspective to the industry,” says Jeffreys.
A product service system
Reflecting on how these principles come through in their eyewear, Jeffreys says, “The Australian stuff is the practicality: you can pop together a pair of glasses. If you scratch the lense, we’ll just pop in a new lense; if you break a piece, we’ll replace it.
“The Germanic side is this utilitarian, clever system. Our partnership with Carl Zeiss Vision is a great demonstration of what we are trying to achieve – quality is critical and here we have one of the oldest optics manufacturers in the world.”
One of his bugbears with modern optometry is what he describes as the “horrible” customer experience. “We’ve met a huge number of people who hated [buying glasses] – it’s an anxious purchase,” he says. “You walk into this sterile, quasi-medical shop and there are thousands of frames; you don’t understand the technical jargon and you don’t know the cost – it’s embarrassing.”
To remedy this, Dresden’s approach is about “being simple and transparent”, bringing as much of the experience in-store and having respect for customers’ time and loyalty. “The pricing is straightforward and visible and we make up the glasses on the spot,” he says. There’s even a hobby injection moulder in the Newtown workshop where they can whip up experimental frames.
The lower price point also makes it easier for customers to justify extra pairs. “We believe that glasses should reflect how people live,” he adds.
Hands-on manufacturing
Staying close to manufacturing through the use of local suppliers and materials has given the team at Dresden far more control over their end product. In the very early stages, Jeffreys says the team consulted with Sydney industrial design house Vert and they were critical in establishing this direction. “We co-developed the frames together taking the Dresden frame from a prototype to the first round of manufacturing.”
Since then, they’ve further refined the product internally with support from their ongoing partner Astor Industries. In a lucky break, they stumbled across the Sydney-based outfit just as they were struggling to find the necessary local resources to make their frames. “They’re world experts in injection moulding and they’ve been really important in allowing us to learn the system,” says Jeffreys.
The relationship also proved to be a turning point for Astor which had been fully focused on making car badges. “The local automotive industry was in a downward spiral and while Dresden is a relatively small part of our business, the product represented the first steps of diversification for us,” says owner and managing director Neil Henderson. Astor is now moving into healthcare, sporting goods and the brewery industry. “We’re glad Dresden looked for an Australian manufacturer,” he adds.
Eye health innovation
Establishing in-house expertise is core to Dresden’s approach. “Essentially we produce everything ourselves,” says Jeffreys. No one in the team of 12 has a job title and he sees this as essential to the company’s high rate of innovation. “Job titles result in delineation,” he says, “and the most important thing is that any member of the team can help anyone solve a problem.”
According to Jeffreys, this in-house capability has made it possible for Dresden to be agile and to continually adapt and improve its product and service. To prove his point, the team has just finished building a cloud-based platform to provide customers with instant access to their own comprehensive eye health record.
“It doesn’t just have your prescription, it has all the screening and diagnostics of your optometry appointment so you can share it with other health practitioners,” he explains.
Developed in partnership with Dr Yogi Yogesan of the Australian e-Health Research Centre, who is leading pioneering research into medical imaging and diagnostics, the system will be capable of analysing an image of a person’s retina and picking up eye issues and general health conditions, such as diabetes.
The aim is to further simplify the process for customers. “We want people to be able to access and own their health information – that’s the most important thing,” says Jeffreys.
Taking the product to the people
Jeffreys is loath to call himself an entrepreneur saying, “it sounds too grand and classy”, and thinks his “strange mix of skills” – from stints in education, advertising and government – render him fairly unemployable. But ‘entrepreneur’ is probably a label he needs to get used to, particularly as, like GoGet, he is keen to take Dresden further afield.
Last year, the team built a solar-assisted transportable workshop, complete with optometry gear, for a new initiative called Dresden Mobile. To date, the trailer has visited festivals and regional centres in NSW and Victoria and the plan is to reach more remote communities that are not afforded access to eyewear health.
The concept is also an educational tool to spread Dresden’s sustainability message. By staying close to manufacturing, the brand has minimised its impact on the environment and the trailer itself is another great example of this. It has been built using a mix of recycled content products, such as the trailer’s gold polycarbonate cladding, and fully recycled materials including recycled sails, copper and hardwood.
To bring the project to life, they drafted in Sydney architect Alexander Symes – a friend of McDermott’s – and tapped into the expertise of local building and construction company, Paramount Property Group. “Those guys specialise in using recycled materials so they were really critical to its success,” says Jeffreys.
The team received a particularly enthusiastic reception when it took Dresden Mobile to a weekend festival in Melbourne’s CBD. “We were parked in the middle of Federation Square and completely sold out of glasses in three days – it was crazy,” he recalls.
Looking beyond Australia
But Jeffreys’ vision for Dresden extends far beyond Melbourne’s Yarra River. He believes the brand has global potential. Dresden already ships internationally via its e-commerce site to the US, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and others – primarily through word-of-mouth referrals, and Jeffreys is particularly focused on developing countries. “Dresden is about anybody, anywhere in the world who needs a pair of strong, quality glasses that are affordable,” he says.
As a child he bounced between his home city of Perth and Papua New Guinea, where his parents worked as teachers establishing training colleges in the lead up to Independence. He also spent a good deal of time in his mother’s birthplace of Mumbai and believes the global eyewear industry fails to cater to the poor.
Dresden is developing a prototype one-man kiosk – essentially the mobile workshop in miniature, which the team intends to take to India or Zambia later this year, with a view to rolling out the concept. “These countries have millions of people who need glasses and eyesight is directly related to productivity,” he says.
The aim is to create micro-business opportunities and offer Dresden glasses for around $10, including screening. With advances in technology he says it’s getting easier for a layperson to determine someone’s prescription. These countries also have fewer industry regulations, so the plan is to train a local person to use their equipment, which would then hook up with Dresden’s new cloud-based platform to offer customers in India or Zambia the same level of screening as customers in Australia.
By providing the same checks as an optometrist and then tying up with referral services, say if cataracts or other issues are detected, he hopes to help remedy the shortfall in eye health facilities. At the last count Zambia had just 19 optometrists for a population of 14 million. “The normal solution is to train more optometrists but that would take forever,” he says. “Early detection is the key thing we’ll be able to achieve and by giving people access to this information, they can start to control their health.”
As we talk it’s clear that Jeffreys is bubbling over with ideas for Dresden. For now though, the team plans to continue honing its retail offering and refining its product. As a great demonstration of the latter, he shows me the fruits of a just completed experiment, which also encapsulates the brand’s ethos, via pictures on his Smartphone.
“A ranger in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory has been collecting fishing nets off the beach and he mailed them to us by express post,” he explains. “Fishing nets happen to be made from nylon, so putting two and two together we ground them up and moulded them.” The result? Vivid blue, 100 per cent recycled frames. “The nets come in different colours and as we get more through there might be a red one or an orange one – there’s something very raw about it.
“From a business perspective, we get free material; from an environmental perspective, that material is no longer drifting around trapping marine animals; and from a customer perspective, they’re part of the solution to things.”
It looks like Dresden’s story is only just beginning.
This article was first published on the Australia Unlimited website in May 2016.
