Online entrepreneur offers specs for £15

A new internet company offering fully glazed prescription spectacles at prices that undercut all opticians is in the spotlight after a profile of its 21-year-old founder appeared in The Daily Telegraph (August 18). Glassesdirect.co.uk offers complete spectacles including case, delivery and guarantee from £15. Its founder, James Murray Wells, an English graduate who runs the site from his parents' disused stables in Gloucestershire, believes his company will revolutionise the way Britons buy their spectacles. Customers enter their prescription details online and choose from around 70 frame styles. Unless otherwise specified Glasses Direct will use an average pupillary distance of 63mm. Bifocal or varifocal lenses are available for an additional £5 or £10 respectively. 'People can't believe our prices,' Murray Wells told the newspaper, 'but that's because the high street shops maintain retail prices at 10 to 20 times the cost price of the spectacles. 'When I started to research the cost of glasses, I was met with a wall of silence. I called eight different companies and they refused to tell me the manufacturing cost because it is considered sensitive information.' The GOC, however, is currently evaluating whether Prescription Eyewear, the Tetbury-based company that runs the website, meets its regulations. Registrar Peter Coe told optician that the GOC had been contacted by a number of registrants about Glasses Direct. 'We are finding some further information so as to ascertain exactly what the position is and we will then be comparing that information with Section 27 of the Act and the Sale of Optical Appliances rules. We will then determine whether the GOC will take any action.' However, The Telegraph reported that legal advice and advertising accounted for most of Murray Wells' start-up costs. Glasses Direct says it employs the services of a registered dispensing optician who 'supervises the dispensing of all our glasses', satisfying the requirements of Section 27. It also says that you must be over 18 to order and that you must not be blind or partially sighted.