The economy, by all accounts, is in a dismal state, and that’s bad news for any business with a retail component. “Anyone who tells you business is good, they’re lying,” one Toronto optician recently lamented. But not everything is doom and gloom.
Even in bad times, people still need their glasses. In that way, optical is one comparatively recession-proof industry. And there have been such major advances in lens quality, thanks to free-form digital processing, that lenses are one area in which margins have improved. A quick glance north from Toronto provides evidence that there is confidence in this new technology and its ability to buck the economic trend.
Plastic Plus, the Canadian distributor for Seiko lenses, is adding 5000 square feet to its factory and expanding production with a new conveyor system and Satisloh surfacing equipment. They’ll also be adding a new coating lab in the spring. It’s a risky time to be sinking millions of dollars into an expansion, but the banks backed it and company president Paul Faibish is bullish about his company’s future.
“We’ve had several people from all over Europe, North America and the Caribbean come and see what we’re doing,” he says. Plastic Plus was the first independent lab to start free-form production and in 2006 became one of the first in the world to process backside free-form lenses, he says.
Free-form equipment does not come cheap. Setting up a decent production line will cost a company about $1 million. And in a recession, will people pay a premium for these premium lenses? If they know what is different about them, it seems likely that many will.
“The worst free-form lens is better than the best conventional lens,” Faibish says. Each line in his plant can produce 250–300 pairs of lenses per day, be they Succeed, Succeed Ws or Supercede or its latest addition, Supercede Ws.
Faibish isn’t alone in his enthusiasm for free-form. By summer, about 20 percent of progressive lenses being sold in Canada were free-form. That number has only risen, particularly with Centennial Optical adding the new Sola HDV lens this autumn. Like other free-form progressive lenses, the Sola HDV is produced using a lot more measurements than would be used for a conventional lens. With PD, pantoscopic tilt and other factors brought in, it can be customized in millions of iterations. To further optimize the Sola HDV lens, even more measurements are factored into the design, including frame size. This level of customer specificity is what makes free-form lenses so much better. And all the manufacturers agree that optometrists and opticians are driving demand.
How high is demand? In the autumn, Plastic Plus reported that 75 percent the progressive lenses it sends out are Seiko free-form. That’s about 20–25 percent of their total business. Over at Hoya, about half of their progressive lens business is free-form. At Essilor, it’s about 35–40 percent of their progressive lens business. Those numbers are impressive, considering that Nikon introduced the first free-form lens to the Canadian market less than five years ago.
“The conventional lens business is going out,” says Tibor Martz, technical assistance group manager of Nikon Optical Canada. “It’ll be three to five years before it’ll be hard to get anything conventional in Canada.
This year, Nikon is pushing the envelope on progressive lens technology by using free-form production to create lenses with a higher base curve. The SeeMax Progressive 1.60 and Nikon W 1.60 will be available with a base curve of 5. Thanks to free-form production, this can be done without the warpage and distortion normally associated with high base curves. The company is also adding the new Nikon SeeStyle lens, which will come in base curves of 3, 5 and 8, giving wearers the ability to choose from a much wider selection of frames.
Another company that’s moving quickly to expand digital production is Essilor, which has begun to apply the new technology to single-vision lenses with the Essilor 360° lenses. Using the same wave front technology as they do with Varilux Ipseo, the manufacturer is able to “break Prentice’s law,” says Thierry Cordevant, who heads up progressive lens marketing for Essilor Canada. In other words, they’re not restricted by having to use approximative angles. The result is a much better lens, and one that functions better in low-light environments.
One of the key changes in lens design has been the shift to two-sided surfacing. By splitting the function onto two surfaces, Cordevant explains, a manufacturer is able to add more complexity to the design and create a better lens.
“At the beginning, I was not totally convinced single-vision wearers would see the difference between the aspheric lenses of today and single vision 360,” he says, adding that he changed his mind once research showed that nearly every wearer saw the difference. “This was, for me, a real surprise, and I think there’s a real benefit for the wearer.”
Although most of the attention these days is on progressive lenses and free-form production, new conventional lens designs are still coming out, particularly in the single-vision market. The latest to hit the streets is the Nulux Active 8 from Hoya. It’s essentially the Nulux design, but with a vertical aspheric component intended to make it easier for wearers to refocus at different distances. Also, to improve binocular vision, the left and right lenses are not symmetrical.
The intended market is heavy multimedia users, who are always fiddling with their laptop, iPod or Blackberry, even while walking down the street or shopping.
Hoya is also active in the free-form business, and is focusing on getting even more information about wearers into the lens design, says David McGrath, head of business development. In addition to the measurements used in most free-form manufacturing, the company is asking more questions, particularly about wearing habits, past experience and lifestyle.
Eyecare professionals can take digital measurements and add to them the answers to a questionnaire. The results are all fed into a machine that factors them into a customized lens design. Lifestyle dispensing is not new, but incorporating the answers mathematically into the lens design is a bit of a shift. In the past, lifestyle dispensing has also been highly subjective.
“You now have an analytic tool that would give you a non-subjective answer,” McGrath says. And if you’re not into the lifestyle aspect, he notes, the machine does have an “override” button.
For highly myopic progressive lens patients, Rodenstock has also unveiled a new lens, the Impression Myop and Impression Myop XS. These new lenses offer distance powers of -4.25 to -17.00 with up to 6.00 cyl and adds of 0.75 to 3.00. They’re back-surfaced lenses and are can be customized with PD, face-form angle, pantoscopic tilt and corneal vertex distance.
All these new options can be head-spinning, but they all mean one thing: better lenses. And even in a down economy, people will spend a little more if they’re getting a better product that will truly help them to see more clearly. Canada is leading the world in free-form production, with a faster acceptance than almost any other market. As these lenses become the norm for progressives and emerge on the single-vision market, it will be interesting to watch the response from patients, as well as effects on bottom lines. •