Cubitts announced a new eyewear collection to celebrate its 10th anniversary and outlined plans for the future, including the use of artificial intelligence and potential international expansion.
The independent optical practice started as an online eyewear retailer before opening its first site a year later in Soho and now has 16 locations, including 11 in London and five outside.
Founder Tom Broughton explained to Optician that the idea was to create a brand for people who wanted to wear spectacles after feeling frustrated at what was available on the high street.
He said: ‘I started wearing glasses when I was at school. I was really into the Smiths and obsessed with Morrissey. I subsequently found out he wore NHS 524s, but I thought he looked so cool. Then I got into Britpop and was obsessed with Pulp and Jarvis Cocker wore these amazing Cutler and Gross frames.
‘People have such an interesting relationship with glasses and a lot of it is based on what stage in life they started wearing them. You meet people who wore glasses from the age of two and they generally don’t like it. But for me at 14, 15, suddenly feeling confident in who I was, it became part of my identity.’
At the time in the late 90s, all Broughton could find were rimless and small, narrow frames. In his 20s, Broughton started to collect vintage eyewear and realised there was a gap in the market to create eyewear for people with similar tastes.
‘There was never a plan that I wanted to have this many sites or this much turnover. We’ve been making all of that up as we go along and we have surpassed any initial expectations,’ he said.
When collecting vintage eyewear, Broughton met Lawrence Jenkin from Anglo-American Optical Company, who took him on as an apprentice and taught him frame-making.
Broughton never imagined his new hobby would become a business but explained it naturally progressed: ‘I thought it would be nice to have a physical space for eye exams, bespoke consultation and repairs. All of which is obviously very difficult to do online. I had to learn a huge amount about how a practice works, the differences between testing equipment and how you measure people’s faces. How do you run a practice? How you take people’s money and offer returns? How do you staff it and train people? It’s been quite a journey.’
Weathering the storm
The Cubitts website launched on October 25, 2013, and by November 4, 2014, the first Cubitts practice opened in Soho with a second in Borough Market following in September, 2015.
‘The first year was horrible. I’d like to be able to have this rose-tinted nostalgia about it, but it was incredibly difficult. It took nearly 10 years to save up the money to launch it and then, within about three or four months, I had spent it all.
‘The company was losing money and we were about to go bankrupt. It was just me and Joe, who was our first employee, running it out of my flat. We tried to get investment from loads of people, but we just got rejection after rejection. There are all these statistics about the percentage of businesses that don’t last a year and I understand why because I was so close to giving up many times.
‘Then there was one week in June or July, 2014, that everything changed. We were stocked in a physical store for the first time and we met a person who became an investor. It went from me accepting that it was going to fail and go out of business to suddenly having these little green shoots of hope,’ he recalled.
While uncertain about the future of Cubitts, Broughton made a list of what he could try to make the business work. On that list was finding a stockist in a physical store.
‘I remember going around with a bag of frames and knocking on doors. A bloke opened the door and I said, “I hope you don’t mind being intruded, but I’d love to have stock in your store.’ And he was like, “yeah, you could do that.” That was the real turning point because it suddenly meant that, for the first time, we had our frames and our brand in front of a new type of customer,’ Broughton said.
International aspirations
When he outlined the challenges Cubitts currently encounter, such as cost of living, Brexit, political instability, levels of inflation and retail issues, Broughton identified a general sense of uncertainty.
‘There’s not one single thing that itself is a knockout like Covid was. All these things combined add to this sense of uncertainty and dealing with that is tough. You don’t know what’s coming.
‘We’ve grown from one employee to 140 people. With that, there are growing pains. The people joining us now see us as the kind of grown-up professional organisation, whereas in my head, we’re still this little, feral upstart.’
Broughton said he was glad that he was unaware of how difficult starting a business would be because, otherwise, he would never have started it. He compared it to climbing a mountain: ‘You think you’re at the top, but then realise there’s another summit.’ However, he said it all got easier as the team grew.
Cubitts could soon become an international business with New York identified by Broughton as a city with plenty of potential for the brand.
‘We could do a really good job, but it’s another big, scary, expensive challenge. When I think about what Cubitts is in the future, we’re still small and fiercely independent with a strong set of values and principles, but I do see us as a more international brand,’ he said.
UK expansion was not off the cards either but only if the right site in the right place became available. This, Broughton said, was something he was unwilling to compromise on simply for the desire to grow.
Technology and the role artificial intelligence can play in the eyewear purchasing experience is another area Broughton enthused about.
A Cubitts app has been collecting data on facial measurements, optical measurements, position of eyebrows and demographics. Cubitts used deep learning to identify fitting and style recommendations for frames to create a more intelligent way of selecting and designing frames.
‘The more scans we get, the bigger the data set and the cleverer it becomes. There’s a point in the future, not too long away, where we can truly use face scanning to genuinely offer an amazing alternative to in-store,’ he said.
The Emotional Utilitarian
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Cubitts created a new eyewear collection inspired by the progressive movement of 1930s modernism.
‘I’ve always naturally been drawn to that time. The world was changing and there’s this kind of modernity creeping in. People were really optimistic about the future and they thought that design played an important role in changing and improving the human condition.
‘There’s a bunch of 20th century designers who did interesting work with materials, manufacturing and construction by rethinking these different objects,’ Broughton said.
Among those who inspired the Emotional Utilitarian collection was furniture designer Gerald Summers who used bent plywood to create organic chairs and furniture, which was translated into a frame with bent lugs for the first time. Also, Eileen Gray, who worked with lacquer inspired by Japanese screens, which Cubitts interpreted by creating laminations with contrasting colours.
Broughton said: ‘It gives us a chance to push things more and experiment in a way that we love to do. Some of them will work and maybe some won’t but that’s the beauty of experimentation, working by trial and error and making lots of mistakes.
‘We’ve been trying with lamination for years and it’s taken us to this point to master it and understand how to bond acetate to acetate, the optimum thickness of material and how to use different densities of acetate together to form different curvatures. We’ve made a lot of mistakes, but we’ve got to the point where we think we’ve mastered it.’
Broughton said after struggling in the first two years of starting Cubitts and later contending with Covid, Cubitts only had a clean run of business for five years. He said he learnt a lot in that period and was proud of what he achieved but was excited at the thought of what could come next.
‘Going through that journey has made me change my expectations and aspirations. We’re like a 10-year-old child and now we have obligations to turn it into a beautiful adult and get through those difficult teenage years,’ he concluded.