Innovation and partnership

Irish company Scope was founded in 2009 by brothers John and Tom Freyne, but the story behind the family run business dates to 1935 when their grandfather, Jack Freyne, opened a pharmacy in Clondalkin, a town in the Dublin suburbs. ‘Grandad was a very entrepreneurial man,’ says Tom Freyne, chief executive officer at Scope. ‘He actually went to Berlin in 1947 in order to formulate his own pharmaceutical products and work with manufacturing partners there before bringing them back to sell in Ireland and the UK.’

A generation on, Freyne’s father, Garrett, combined running the pharmacy with veterinary work and expanded the business into eye care via a partnership with German company Dr Mann Pharma. ‘I used to work in the pharmacy, started off as a security guard and then worked my way up to be a pharmacy assistant,’ says Freyne. ‘Serving customers, getting to know the business, getting to know the different drugs. I got a real appetite for the healthcare space. John and I were learning a lot about the dry eye segment, how big a market it was, how big an opportunity it was, and that it was something that we could get into if the opportunity arose.’