You have a business idea. What next?

Back in 2017, when our founder — Sid Sethi — broke his only pair of prescription glasses a day before his semester exams, he hurried to the Manchester City Centre to look for an emergency pair. He walked into the stores located here so that he could take care of his vision and walked out with an idea to take care of our vision too.

The experience that the then student and a budding entrepreneur underwent at these stores helped him identify the gaps in the eyewear market. High price tags, poor customer experience, and a high turnaround time were the problems that Sid had identified. Hence, the idea of Specscart was born — to plug the identified gaps.

But was the idea enough?

Definitely not! To materialise the idea into reality, Sid began the groundwork to change the way people perceive glasses — Specscart’s vision. Read on to know how Specscart went from idea to launch!

Thorough Research

Well, the eyewear industry is huge and the competition is boiling hot. We were entering into a market that had well-established giants, and with acquisitions and mergers becoming very common, they were getting even bigger. Without in-depth market research, we would only be moving into uncharted waters.

To get to know how the eyewear industry works, Sid travelled extensively, going from factories to factories, from opticians to opticians, and spending hours here understanding the fine details of all that goes into the making of glasses, ranging from the procurement of raw materials to the glazing of lenses before they are fitted into the frames.

Today, Specscart offers quality pairs of glasses and sunglasses at pocket-friendly prices, and most of the orders are prepared within 30 minutes. Well, Sid’s experience at these factories and with these opticians has a big role to play in cutting down both prices and turnaround time at Specscart.

The research was not just limited to understanding how glasses are made, but was a comprehensive one, which included grasping the consumer behaviour, SWOT analysis of our competitors, and comprehending the overall market dynamics.

The Right Mentorship

We consider ourselves very fortunate to have mentors who have always been there to guide us on the right path, both before and after the launch.

Since our mentors had been there in similar situations before us, there was a lot to learn from their experiences, maybe even their mistakes. You not only learn from your mistakes but also from that of others.

For anyone working on converting an idea into a running business, there are bound to be tough times and things can get tricky at times. So was the case with us. During these times, it was our mentors who were our pillars of strength and always kept our spirits high — like Prof. Martin Henry whose words still serve as a guiding light as we move from one stage of growth to the other.

The Award-winning Business Pitch

Fortune certainly favours the brave, but also those who work hard with clarity and belief in what they are doing.

Thus came the opportunity for Sid in the form of the Albert Gubay Award organised at the University of Manchester. He was determined to not let this opportunity go away at any cost and left no stones unturned to prepare a business pitch for Specscart. Today, when you ask Sid what was going on in his mind while preparing this pitch, with a humble smile, he replies, “I prepared this pitch with a mindset that I had already won the award.”

The business pitch was very well thought-out and contained the nitty-gritty of how the business was going to operate. From the logo and tagline to the store setting, Sid didn’t leave out even the finest details.

Specscart was declared the winner of the Albert Gubay Award 2017. The cash injection and a free rental space in Walkden that we were rewarded with, gave us the initial push to launch our business and take it to the people.

We were ready to launch now. Thus began the work of positioning Specscart in the market and building its brand awareness.

Market Positioning

While market positioning is always a work in progress, it is very important to get the first impression right.

When Apple launched the iPod in 2001, it was introduced as “a thousand songs in your pocket”. Such crisp marketing! Instead of talking about what would be the memory space of the iPod and its various other specifications, Apple was spot on with its messaging and picked the exact language that its target audience understood. This is very much evident in the outstanding success of Apple’s iPod.

A frame for every game — a tagline that we came up with to match our revolutionary vision of changing the way people perceive glasses — not only as an optical tool but also as an intimate fashion accessory.

Not just our tagline, whether it was our name, our logo, or our tone of voice, we fine-tuned every single aspect of our business to ensure that our identity was crystal clear to our target audience. Most importantly, while creating brand awareness, we kept our values as the central focus and never deviated from them.

Today, Specscart is one of the fastest-growing startups in the UK, and this has been made possible by the extensive amount of time and effort that we put into the groundwork during the phase in which we went from idea to launch.