As lens production keeps gathering under a few global owners, Basel’s Optiswiss is going the other way: the independent Swiss manufacturer is looking for experienced distributors and franchise laboratories to carry its lenses into new markets, starting at SILMO 2026.
Optiswiss has drawn up a growth plan around an international network of partners and begun looking in earnest for the distributors and franchise operators who would represent it in markets where its name is not yet established. Two kinds of company are in its sights: experienced optical distributors, and lens laboratories interested in producing Optiswiss lenses locally under a franchise partnership. Those conversations begin at SILMO in Paris from 25 to 28 September 2026, and anyone who would rather not wait can reach the company’s international team at international@optiswiss.ch.
An independent in a consolidating market
The timing is no accident. The ophthalmic lens business has spent the past twenty years getting smaller at the top. A long run of mergers has left a handful of large groups in charge of much of the world’s lens production, and several of them now belong to companies that also own frame brands and retail chains. For an optician or a regional distributor, that has subtly changed what it means to choose a lens supplier. The company making your lenses might also be selling, one step removed, to the customer walking into your shop. Optiswiss has sat outside that arrangement for its entire history, and as the rest of the field has consolidated around it, that history has started to look less like a quirk and more like a position worth pressing.
The Basel company has made prescription lenses since 1937 and today sells high-tech lenses with a strong focus on the optical trade. Production has stayed in one place, a single Basel site that runs around the clock and turns out several thousand lenses a day on recent automated equipment. It is the biggest lens manufacturer in Switzerland, with upward of 250 employees. Its customers already span more than twenty countries. In the company’s reading, the market has now come to it. “The market is changing,” says Frederik Zimmermann, Director Business Development & Global Expansion at Optiswiss. “More and more distributors and laboratories are looking for an independent premium supplier that focuses exclusively on the optical trade. We believe this is exactly what many independent businesses are looking for today.”
Two ways in
Two routes are on the table, suited to different appetites. A distributor can fold the Optiswiss range into an existing book of customers, setting a premium independent line next to what it already carries. A franchise partner commits more fully: a laboratory produces Optiswiss lenses in its own facility, to the company’s designs and quality standards, and gains the advantages of manufacturing close to the customer. Delivery times shorten and supply chains contract, which leaves the partner with a flexibility it can pass straight on to the opticians it serves. Beneath both lies the same idea Optiswiss has always pushed about its customer relationships: a partnership of equals, with decisions made close to the market. Zimmermann puts it more pointedly. “They gain an independent partner committed to sustainable growth – not a vertically integrated corporation competing for the same end customer.”
A range that has to hold its own
Whatever a partner signs up to carry has to stand comparison with those same global names, and Optiswiss has spent the last few years tightening its catalogue. The backbone is SWISSVARIO, the company’s progressive lens line. It runs from the everyday Smart design through Fusion AI, a lens that adapts to its wearer through AI-driven personalisation, up to Biometrics Horizon at the top. The flagship reached the market in 2025 on the back of several years of biometric lens data and tailors each lens to the measured biometrics of the individual eye. Around the progressives, the range extends through single-vision, near-work and sport lenses.
The sharpest sense of where Optiswiss is competing comes from myopia management, one of the few corners of the lens market growing quickly as screens reshape children’s eyesight. Its lens here, SMYLE, runs on technology licensed from Brien Holden Vision Institute research, and a Spanish study published in 2024 found it cut myopia progression by 39 percent over a year against ordinary single-vision lenses (Sánchez-Tena et al., Children, 2024). That is enough to put it in the same conversation as the better-known myopia lenses the larger groups have brought to market.
Around the lenses sits a set of services the company counts as part of the offer. Orders go through an online shop that never closes, measurements and centering run off an iPad app, frame shapes are kept in a tracer archive, and there is ready-made marketing material to draw on for a shop window or a social feed. Underneath all of it sits a sustainability programme the company has run for two decades, with ISO 26000 certification and production powered by renewable Swiss electricity.
Starting the conversation
The introductions are meant to happen face to face. Optiswiss will be at SILMO 2026 from 25 to 28 September in Paris, the show that has become the natural meeting ground for this kind of supplier-and-trade conversation, and it is treating the fair as the place where interested distributors and laboratories can take a proper look at the range and the terms. “If you are interested in representing Optiswiss or producing Optiswiss lenses locally under our franchise concept, we would be pleased to start the conversation,” says Zimmermann.
Anyone who would rather not wait can reach the company at international@optiswiss.ch.
Visit Optiswiss at SILMO
SILMO Paris
September 25 to 28, 2026
M142 / Hall 6
About Optiswiss
