The latest news and nalysis on Direct to Consumer initiatives, E-Commerce and Marketplaces.
1-800 Contacts acquires virtual try-on specialist
1-800 Contacts, the U.S. contact lens specialist, has acquired Ditto, a firm also headquartered in the U.S. that provides virtual try-on systems for eyewear brands and eyewear retailers on- and offline, Vision Monday reports.
New investor and strategic focus on Asia for FittingBox
FittingBox, the French-based provider of virtual try on (VTO) systems and other digital solutions, just announced that JINS, the fast-growing Japanese retail chain, had become a shareholder of the company. The investment by JINS allowed earlier financial investors, mainly French venture capital funds Kreaxi and LBO France that have been ...
Jimmy Fairly to boost international business under new ownership
The vertically integrated French eyewear brand Jimmy Fairly is changing hands after its founders, Antonin Chartier and Sacha Bostoni, and the investment fund Experienced Capital, their main financial partner since 2017, agreed to sell a majority stake of the company to the HLD investment fund. Experienced Capital will exit the ...
Hans Anders to start using new AI tool for style recommendations
Hans Anders will start using STYLE PTTRNS, a style recommendation tool for prescription eyewear created by Eindhoven-based startup PTTRNS.ai, on its Dutch e-commerce website starting July 15. The company’s program is presented as a service to assist online and in-store customers in the time-consuming and often challenging selection of their ...
Shift towards omnichannel in U.S. online eyewear purchase
The Vision Council has released the latest edition of its Internet Influence Report, a research conducted in December 2020 among 4,909 U.S. adult consumers and aimed at measuring the role of internet in their recent eyewear purchases. This edition follows previous reports published in 2017 and 2020 that provide a ...
Fielmann soft-launches lens fitting app
In the year 2020, despite the Covid-19 crisis and related retail restrictions, online sales of prescription eyewear in Germany stagnated at around one percent of total market sales according to the latest statistics from the national opticians’ association (ZVA). Commenting on this somewhat surprising data in Fielmann’s annual report, Marc ...
Fittingbox tripled VTOs last year
Fittingbox, the French-based supplier of eyewear virtual try-ons (VTO) and other digital services, has seen the use of its try-on service triple in 2020 to reach 54 million annual VTOs, a spectacular growth driven by new clients’ acquisitions and by the digitization of our sector and a general shift in ...