It was an interesting talk on May 2nd when some of the brand owners from different eyewear and lens brand came together and aired their views on a common platform.
To be honest, there’s plenty of these webinars and I can only see a lot of talk and projections about the future. No real action on the ground. I don’t blame anyone as we have always been a wait and watch industry. We are scared to upset people, organisations and would rather exist than really grow.
There are some who want to change things around. Ashutosh Vaidya from Safilo is one and I welcome such individuals. They don’t seem scared or worried. And they are looking for support from the industry as on their own they know success will be limited.
There was an interesting suggestion from Rohan Paul. About how the whole experience and not just sale should be digital. The whole process from the consumer entering the store to the product being delivered should be digitised much like the UBER experience.
As Akash pointed out that there’s the pre-sale process which is as important as the sale and the post-sale process and this I feel is a good add on to what Rohan mentioned and if even this could be digitised then the experience would be truly digital.
Ronak and Bhavin spoke with passion about their own projects and I am really happy that they are taking the initiatives and putting money where their mouth is.
[embedyt]https://youtu.be/Sl9oJYGMNpg[/embedyt]Ketan and Maarten do believe in digital and their experience in global markets and different industries, can help us have a genuinely clearer foresight.
Their foresight is about the co-existence of traditional and digital. And that probably the traditional will continue to be very strong for a much longer time into the future than we seem to be anticipating.
I can personally vouch for Ketan’s intuition as he was amongst the first well-wishers during our online journey with YouAndEyeOnline and he had told us more or less the same thing 5 years ago.
Maarten comes with experience from another industry and his perspective that things would change and we will evolve, to me sounds practical. If we try to change and things evolve differently it could be wasted effort. So we don’t need to change but rather evolve should be the mantra.
I will have a proposal for this in the coming days. Stay tuned.
