The growth of customized or personalized lenses appears to be steady, according to findings from Jobson Optical Research’s 2014 Premium Lens MarketPulse. Two-thirds (65 percent) of retailers said that customized or personalized progressives lenses made up a greater proportion of their total lens sales in 2013 than they had versus three years ago. Comparatively, 34 percent said standard progressive sales had increased over the last three years, while 28 percent said that sales of bifocals and trifocals had decreased as a percentage of total lens sales over the last three years respectively.
Click HERE to purchase Jobson Optical Research’s 2014 Premium Lens MarketPulse report.
Are you positioning your practice for the future? My crystal ball says our future is personalized services and personalized lenses. The patient will be able to get everything else over the internet. To position your practice for the future, we need to start now, not later.
One of the changes we need to make now is to make the shift to personalized lenses. Talk to your spectacle lens labs to make sure you have the equipment needed to be able to prescribe personalized lenses.
To move forward, here is a three-step process: brand, educate and implement.
1. Brand the spectacle lenses in your practice. I like the terms Standardized Lenses, Customized Lenses and Personalized Lenses. All of the lenses sold by any of the major lens manufacturers can be placed into one of those three labels.
Standardized lenses are older lenses, usually 20th century technology.
Customized lenses are 21st century lenses, but are averaged for the typical patient. These are like suits you can buy off the rack. They work for most people, but are definitely not top-of-the-line product.
Personalized lenses are individualized. These lenses are like a tailored suit. Specifically, the algorithm used to make the lenses uses measurements taken from the patient to generate a lens made just for that patient.
2. Educate both your staff and your patients. By branding your spectacle lenses into three categories, it becomes very easy to educate patients about the different types of lenses and why you’re prescribing the specific lens type for the patient in your chair. Identify the charts, handouts, web information and pictures you will need to tell the story of the three types of lenses.
3. Implementation is the third step. If you are not doing this currently, then set a date to implement. Make sure you have all the support materials needed to implement. Don’t forget to ask your spectacle lens lab reps for help. Remember the Nike slogan to “just do it.”
Once you’ve implemented, keep track of patient responses to refine the message.
