SJ: Can you tell me a little bit about your background, Munish?
I worked with Marks & Spencer for 21 years, including 10 years as head of sustainability there. I left in 2018 to work with non-government organisations and I started working with Specsavers on a consultancy basis. I split my time between Specsavers and as a fellow at the University of Cambridge, where I work with several businesses to put sustainability at their heart. The role is incredibly useful because I’m learning for myself and for Specsavers, taking some of the trends from global business, as well as the good and bad approaches from elsewhere that we can apply to Specsavers.
SJ: Are there any parallels between Marks & Spencer and Specsavers?
I joined Marks & Spencer when it was still a family business and saw it become publicly listed, but Specsavers has remained very much family-orientated. Both have a sense of care for the customers, but I just saw a different and deeper dimension of that at Specsavers. I think that comes from the desire to improve people’s health outcomes through sight and hearing, but over time, I’ve realised that care characteristic also applies to colleagues and the partnerships the company has with thousands of joint venture partners businesses all over the world.
SJ: What about differences in sustainability challenges and implementing improvements?
The mindset at Specsavers is one of continuous improvement, and in optical space, a humility that we are not, perhaps at the same level of maturity around sustainability that a Unilever or a Patagonia or even a Marks & Spencer might be.
We do, however, have a desperate desire to accelerate very quickly, which we’re able to achieve. We have built a brilliant sustainability team over the past 18 months and in that time, the company has achieved what would have taken Marks & Spencer three-to-five years to complete.
SJ: Patients are at the heart of any optical retailer - what are the noises coming back from Specsavers’ patients on sustainability?
That’s a great question. It’s always useful to take a proposition to any stakeholder about what you’re trying to achieve and it’s important to know where the material areas of impact are for a business. We’ve consulted customers in every region we operate in, and we’ve seen that they get a lot of reassurance when they can see sustainable changes being made in stores, even if it’s something like our spectacle cases, which are now made of post-consumer waste, and they’re not automatically offered to customers, either, because we know people tend to have a lot of cases already.
We’re about to conclude a major piece of research on where the customers think we should focus our efforts, but we fundamentally believe, and I think our customers are expecting that efficiency and ethics should be embedded in our product and should be an automatic part of what they get.
SJ: What about variance in age demographics?
People often ask whether a certain segment of the customer base is more interested in sustainability than others. I think younger customers are more engaged in the topic, but that’s not to say other generations aren’t, it’s just younger customers that are being most active in their discourse with us.
SJ: How can the company’s sustainability strategy be adapted to different needs?
In any aspect of running a business, if you’re not mindful of the context within which you’re operating and how that’s changing, and therefore how you should adapt, then that’s not good news. Zero carbon is important now but building climate resilience may be of greater importance in the future. I also think as we head towards more material scarcity, that will propel society to think about using materials in a more respectful way. It’ll mean that we’ll see new materials coming to the fore and I think that will be quite interesting from our point of view about how we stay on top of that.
You won’t solve new problems with the same solutions. Optician’s recent Eyes on Sustainability conference in Edinburgh was a seminal moment for the optical industry as it came together to discuss new solutions and collaboration for the first time. It needs to be an annual event that brings optical peers together. When it comes to sustainability, there shouldn’t be competitors, and Specsavers is happy to work collaboratively on this critical topic.