MEI System

Main Headquarters

MEI’s main headquarters are located in Ponte San Pietro, Bergamo. At a stone’s throw from Milan, the surrounding area is rich with industry and economic connections.
The headquarters at Ponte San Pietro are especially busy. Currently, 120 people work there, including technicians, programmers, engineers, and machine and idea developers. That doesn’t include administrative operations, which are comprised of a commerce department and a customer service department.

To be able to better serve its diffuse client base, MEI opened MEI Inc., a subsidiary with offices based in Chicago. MEIsystem Asia was later established in Hong Kong and — last but not least — MEIsystem do Brasil was established in Sao Paulo. The offices abroad serve as useful resources for the global clientele of MEI and lend support to the central office’s goals of managing sales, customer assistance, and market penetration.

Mission & History

Founded in 1985 by Stefano Sonzogni and Raffaele Scudeletti, MEI S.r.l. has from the very beginning been in the business of developing CNC machines of the highest quality. In the 1990s, MEI entered the optical market with the introduction of sunglass lens miller Sphera, which reached every large producer of sunglasses across the globe. Through a process of continuous collaboration with its clients, MEI developed a series of further models that brought it to eventually dominate the lens cutter industry.
In the early 2000s, the company took on the challenge of developing a miller for corrective lenses. At the time, the optical industry primarily used grinding techniques for the development of corrective lenses. MEI introduced the industry to revolutionary milling techniques for a superior result. As a result of the greater flexibility and productivity that MEI’s innovation permitted, laboratories could cut the ever more complex shapes required by the demanding eyeglass market.
Following along its path of innovation, MEI went on to develop automated lens loading and tool change systems. Optical laboratories immediately grasped the potential advantages of these inventions. The miller MonoSpheraRX-DD immediately became an enormous success and was followed closely in time by the DoublerR-XDD and the Bisphera-XDD. Rounding out the pack was MEI’s crowning jewel, the 4Racer TBA.
Today, MEI machines can be found around the world in the laboratories of major lens producers, including Carl Zeiss, Essilor, Hoya, Luxottica, and Shamir, as well as in the largest independent laboratories of Europe, Asia, and the U.S.A.
MEI has also begun to cater to the needs of small and midsized laboratories. In 2006, it introduced MEI641, a smaller miller that uses the same innovative technology and software. To round out its offerings, in 2016 MEI introduced EZFIT, the compact solution designed for use inside of stores.
During all these years, MEI has been guided by its steadfast philosophy: to make complex processes simple and to be the first to find solutions to the ever-increasing demands of the optical world.

And the story continues…

Research & Development

All manufacturing of MEI machines takes place at the Italian office. Machines pass from the brainstorming stages through the planning, realization, and testing stages. All MEI machines must pass a rigorous series of tests before being placed on the market to guarantee to our clients the reliability that distinguishes MEI products.

An entire department is dedicated to the constantly evolving areas of research and development. Research and development of new ideas are weight-bearing pillars of the MEI philosophy and as such, the company invests continual resources in these crucial activities.