Bootstrapping a million dollar optical empire: Three blokes, Ebay and a vision

Direct-to-consumer Smart Buy Glasses Group turned over an eight-figure top-line revenue last financial year and the business is expected to expand on this come July 1.

With the global eyewear market revenue projected to reach US$174.06 billion by 2028, the business has a vast growth opportunity.

Whilst discretionary spending is down across the board, the business continues to boom through offering affordable exceptional value products and services which has seen the optical sales and sunglasses sales grow across the budget and luxury price points.

Growing with the business

In 2006, three ambitious Australian entrepreneurs pulled together to found the Smart Buy Glasses Group – bootstrapping the venture from limited funds, but boundless passion and a collective of corporate experience.

Today, Smart Buy Glasses has a global workforce of over 230 people operating in 15 languages across 30 country sites and is headquartered in Hong Kong.

Prior to this co-founders Kalinko, David Menning and Tony Zhuang divided and conquered and worked across every area of the business and learnt along the way with a collective vision to revolutionise the eyewear industry via a socially responsible global company.

The company was funded by listing products on Ebay with no capital – the revenue generated from this was reinvested back into the business and for the first decade of operations the founders didn’t take a proper salary.

“We needed all of the cash flow and profits to be reinvested into the business for growth, however even if we did, we don’t believe it would have worked for us,” Doron Kalinko, Vision Direct co-founder told Inside Retail.

With limited resources, the partners harnessed their passion and various specialties of corporate expertise to create the Smart Buy Glasses Group from scratch, working part-time jobs to support themselves whilst pursuing their dream.

Direct growth vision

In 2007 the business hired a third-party company to develop the first iteration of the website, allowing the operations to leave Ebay. That year the website launched with over 6,000 items available for sale after the trio persevered through a continual search for new suppliers to add to the site.

Smart Buy Glasses Group is the parent group of Vision Direct, since being founded the businesses have grown into multi-million dollar brands across the various global subsidiaries.

“Our business is global and the majority of our business is in the Americas and Europe,” Kalinko said.

“As we sell all types of eyewear for all age groups and budgets, our target is anyone who buys sunglasses, contact lenses or spectacles.” 

“Instead of raising venture and outside capital, we ensured our business was cash flow positive from day one and continually recycled cash flow back into the business,” Kalinko added.

In 2023, Smart Buy Glasses added over 40,000 new items to its site and an additional 28 new brands.

Now the business stocks over 104,000 products across 342 brands across its localised global websites – with a presence in over 15 countries.

Kalinko credits the business’s global expansion success to carefully selecting local markets to enter and ensuring each region’s consumer needs are understood and catered for.

“The Smart Buy Collection is our private label, value collection that we develop and distribute globally,” Kalinko said.

Despite a 76 per cent increase in sales of frames in the over $500 price point and stocking leading designer brands, the proprietary eyewear line which starts at $12 is the number one ranking brand in terms of units sold.

“Smart Buy Glasses is our global retail brand name which we use across our global sites – SmartBuyGlasses.com in the US for example,” Kalinko said.

Team effort

“Bootstrapping an e-commerce company from scratch meant that we could never afford to bring in high-level executives to help grow the business, we couldn’t even afford to pay our founders properly in the first 10 years,” Kalinko said.

“We had no time for politics and high-paid executives hiring other people to do the actual work. We needed hard-working fast learners that were execution-driven,” he added.

Today, only three Australian employees work from the Sydney office, with the main business operations in Italy and Hong Kong. 

“Developing a business like ours required us to build a unique culture where we could nurture people at the beginning of their careers and guide them towards the mindset we needed,” Kalinko said.

“Which relied less on experience and more on being highly passionate and energetic, detail oriented and most importantly learning new skills fast, picking things up quickly and evolving, changing and pivoting as the business required,” he added.

Given the ever-evolving and 24-hour nature of e-commerce, the business required a team of quick learners prepared to work long hours to drive the business forward.

“This gave our team amazing opportunities to shine and accelerate their careers much faster than in other company settings,” Kalinko said.

“A good example of this is a Brazilian national who joined us after university in a customer service representative role for our Portuguese-speaking markets – 10 years later he has risen to be our chief operating officer,” Kalinko added.

“We have many great stories of personal growth in our company, our whole marketing team was borne out of our internship program,” Kalinko finished.

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