Reading that just pissed me off to no end. Eyeglasses are not a luxury for me - they're an absolute necessity. I kind of feel like I'm being preyed upon here by a bunch of Italian ripoff artists.
> But other competitors told us Luxottica has them in a chokehold: if you make glasses, you want to be in their stores; and if you have stores, you want to sell Ray-Bans! So Luxottica can set the prices as high as it wants.
But, in the UK I could choose to buy luxury glasses, but places like specsavers will always offer affordable GBP 20 frames with free lenses as well. And of course the eye test is also free in Scotland.
It's like if Gucci not only was the most common retailer of clothing—and by an enormous margin—but also owned the tailors conveniently located next door.
At most retail chains in the US, there's a small rack of BCGs and safety frames that cost around $30. I know, because I've purchased them as backups.
The part I like best about Zenni is the oleophobic hard AR coating option. It doesn't cost an arm and a leg, and actually lasts a fairly long time without scratching. (If you wear glasses you know that no matter how carefully you clean your glasses, they scratch. And the expensive coatings flake off.) Now I clean my glasses with soap and warm water in the morning, and the water just shakes off at the end. The anti-reflective aspect is somewhat lacking, but the ease of cleaning is what makes it for me.
You can also get cheap sunglasses ex:
http://www.amazon.com/Matte-Reflective-Color-Rimmed-Sunglass...
It's basically the same thing as the watch market you can get cheap (<10$) watches but 'nice' quickly becomes hundreds of dollars. IMO, this has little to do with manufacturing costs it's all about the design, sale, and marketing costs.
It should not come as a surprise that they mostly come from China--apparently the natural enemy of the trademarked luxury brand.
This is why if you have a "vision plan" through your employer, you can't get new glasses the same day, from anywhere. They show inflated US prices on the invoices, but behind the curtain, you're probably getting the same inexpensive goods from China as if you had just ordered them yourself.
You can go a lot of places and just get a simple optometrics prescription for $10. Then you can take that to the web, and order 2 regular sets and one tinted set for less than the price tag on the cheapest, ugliest frame in your optometrist's office. All those frames are different brands of Luxottica.
You are being preyed upon, in the same way that a lot of other people in the US who require durable medical equipment to maintain quality of life are being preyed upon.
If you doubt this, search the web for prices on "underarm aluminum crutch". There is not a lot of variation in design for these. They are essentially a fixed length of a standard size of aluminum tube, cut, bent, and drilled by machines, and bolted together along with some rubber and foamed plastic parts. There are no patent encumbrances. Yet the price varies from less than $20 to over $120 for exactly the same thing. This is, in large part, due to health insurance rules.
And this is why Wal-Mart and Costco and Warby Parker will eventually eat Luxottica's lunch. Because in a competitive market, you have to set your price based on the per-unit cost. Only a monopolist or oligopolist can charge based on what people will pay.
This is the money quote: "Andrea Guerra: Everything is worth what people are ready to pay."
And that is only true when the producers have pricing power, which only occurs in a non-commodity market. You don't have to be Isaac Newton to grind your own lenses. You can make a lens/mirror grinding machine out of washing machine parts and a controller like an Arduino.
It should be impossible for a product that can be created in a nerd garage to be anything other than a competitive commodity market, shouldn't it? Will "open source eyeglasses" ever become a bona fide project?