How Mehdi Oudghiri took on the big boys of eyewear

When Mehdi Oudghiri, co-founder of eyewear giant Eyewa, first moved to Dubai, he was wowed by the region’s sumptuous retail experiences.

It was all beautifully designed stores in opulent malls, which made shopping a pleasure rather than a chore. But there was one notable exception: Shopping for a new pair of glasses tended to be sterile, medicalized… generally not much fun.

“You walk in, you have white floors, white walls, white shelves. Even the people serving you in the store are wearing white blouses,” he tells MONIIFY’s Money Moves. “It feels a lot more like a hospital than a retail store where you’re supposed to buy fashion accessories.”

Then came the bill: “The worst part of it all,” he says. “Because you’ve just been through this horrible experience, and now you need to pay $1,000 for a pair of glasses. At that same price, you can get a smartphone. I was always asking myself… ‘Why?’”

It’s a question that stuck with Oudghiri, a Moroccan who first came to the UAE in 2009. He worked initially as a consultant for Bain and Company, before launching online food delivery platform foodpanda in the Middle East, helping lead its successful expansion ahead of the business’s acquisition in late 2016.

In the wake of that exit, Oudghiri, along with business partner Anass Boumediene – a fellow Moroccan who had worked with him at Bain and Company and foodpanda – decided to quit their jobs and take a punt on disrupting the eyewear industry.

By Oudghiri’s own admission, they knew nothing about the sector and didn’t have much in the way of funding. But they knew a thing or two about online retailing, and scaling at speed. In 2017, they threw together some Shopify websites, striking an agreement with a mom-and-pop optical store in Boumediene’s apartment building to list inventory on its site, and went live.

Today Eyewa is the leading eyewear retailer in the Middle East. It hasn’t played out at all how they envisaged at the start, requiring pivots along the way, like the opening of the e-commerce startup’s first brick-and-mortar store in 2020. Today, the company boasts more than 150 stores across the Gulf, with plans to open 100 more in the coming year.

In a wide-ranging interview with MONIIFY’s Muhammed Mekki, Oudghiri reveals why he and his partners backed themselves to take on the giants of eyewear, the sudden switchback turns on their path to success, and how they brought a tech mentality to traditional retail.

Here are three takeaways from the conversation:

Adapt or die: Eyewa started out as an online eyewear retailer, but found its footing selling contact lenses, before surprising everyone with the opening of physical stores.

Take that shot: Eyewa’s co-founders didn’t know the ins and outs of the eyewear industry, but they got online retailing, and had a conviction that the glasses game was ripe for disruption.

AI is your friend: If Oudghiri was starting out again with $10k to his name, he says he’d still get into online retailing, this time taking advantage of insights from tools like ChatGPT to supercharge the process.

Muhammed Mekki: The global eyewear industry is dominated by some very big names. What made you think you could take on the big players?

Mehdi Oudghiri: When we started looking into the industry, we quickly found out that there were two large global players who dominated their respective fields. When we started, these two companies had just announced that they were planning to merge.

What’s interesting is, as we were trying to learn more about the market in the Middle East, we started looking at the annual reports of these companies. The Middle East wasn’t mentioned a single time.

When you’re … playing at the scale of the global eyewear market, which is over $100 billion, you focus on the US, you focus on Europe, you focus on China. The Middle East is not really a strategic priority. That was the first opportunity that we saw.

The other thing is when we looked at the incumbents, all the chains here, a lot of them were family businesses. Some have been around for hundreds of years and they didn’t really need to innovate. I think that’s really what we saw as a recipe for disruption.

We didn’t know anything about [the industry]. When we looked at it and said, what’s the best way to get into it and to learn, the solution was to go back to what we knew before, which was building online platforms and selling eyewear through our online platform.

Mekki: You were both successful entrepreneurs, having built and scaled up a company prior.

We had done that in the online food delivery space, which is a very different industry. But still… we had learned a lot of things that we believed we could replicate. Now, we didn’t have a lot of funds as we started, so we had to be very creative. What we did is… we built Shopify websites, took some inspiration from some global websites.

Then, in Anass’s building on the ground floor, there was an optical store that was owned by this older couple. We went down to them and we told them: ‘Hey, here’s a proposition. Let us take photos of everything you have in the store. We’ll put them on a website and whatever sells, we just buy from you.’

What we wanted to understand is would people in our region be willing to buy eyewear online? What’s the behavior of the customers? What surprised us is that sunglasses and eyeglasses didn’t really pick up. What picked up from day one was contact lenses. And in our first year, that’s how we’ve managed to scale.

We scaled our online business quite fast. [Then] we scaled sunglasses and we started building and designing and manufacturing our own products.

Mekki: Contact lenses wasn’t your initial plan going to market. But there was an even more surprising pivot to come, for an e-commerce startup – opening a physical store. How did that come about?

There was one category we were still struggling to crack online, and that’s eyeglasses. When we looked into it, what we realized is that in our region, the first step of the customer journey when they buy eyeglasses is an eye exam. And in our region… that eye exam is done in a retail store.

It was very difficult to ask a customer to go to a physical store of a competitor, take that eye test, pay for it, walk away, and come on our app and transact.

We needed to solve that customer pain point and capture the customer from the beginning of the journey. That’s why we decided to move from being a pure online player to an omnichannel retailer. So we opened our first store, back in December 2020, in the Mall of Dhahran in Saudi Arabia.

Mekki: You’re a tech company that has raised VC funding from some of the top names around. And suddenly you’re telling them, ‘Listen, e-commerce is great, but we’re going to open up retail stores.’ How did that conversation go?

It was difficult at first. When you talk about brick and mortar, it just sounds strange and outdated. But the beauty of it is that we’ve done a lot of experiments online, because we were well funded. So, the way we positioned this to our investors is, let’s look at it as an experiment. If it doesn’t work, that’s okay.

Mekki: Take me back to opening that first store. What was going through your mind?

I was scared more than anything. None of us had ever operated retail stores before. And we had done something that was completely different from what was available. We had colorful stores, loud music playing, and we’re like, ‘Is this going to work?’

One of my dear friends … told us you need to look at your sales on the first day. If you go above a couple of thousand dollars, you’re in good shape.

To our surprise, people just started walking in one after the other and the store was packed, which I had never seen in my life in an optical store. On the first day, we reached over $4,000. So that was a relief. But that was also a very exciting moment because we realized, okay, we’re on to something.

Mekki: Eyewa’s known for its innovative use of technology. Where are things heading in your industry?

The way we always think about it is how can we make eyewear more accessible? That’s really how we try to leverage technology. So Virtual Try On was one of the first initiatives that we had launched on the app, where essentially you’re able to experiment and see the frames on your face using augmented reality.

We wanted to … make it light enough so that it can work anywhere in the region, despite sometimes having slower or connectivity. I think the other evolution that we see in terms of technology is around tele-optometry – being able to conduct eye tests from anywhere.

Mekki: Finally, imagine you’re starting out in your career and have pulled together your first $10,000 to invest. What do you do with it?

Get on Shopify. Come up with an idea. Leverage AI, which we didn’t have 10 years ago when we started.

I think today AI allows you to be a lot more productive. I would go on ChatGPT – not to use it as the tool to build it – but ask it, ‘What are the best tools to build a great Shopify website?’

Get some, try to identify by asking those questions and understanding where are some market opportunities to build an e-commerce. What kind of products can actually sell well, where you have gaps in your region? I would go and start with that, and then … you’d do iteration.

Maybe the idea didn’t work. You already have your website. You can just replace it with some other products, and you can keep on iterating until you find something that works. Then the $10,000 can be spent on marketing so that you can scale your idea.

Edited by Lin Noueihed. If you have any tips, ideas or feedback, please get in touch: talk-to-us@moniify.com

How Mehdi Oudghiri took on the big boys of eyewear – and won

Here are three takeaways from the conversation: