[ad_1]
Helping consumers find the perfect eyewear is a booming global business, giving rise to giants like Warby Parker in the US and Lenskart in India. In the Middle East, this market is producing its own upward force: yeah.
Eyewa, headquartered in Dubai and Riyadh, sells a wide range of eyewear products, including prescription eyeglasses, sunglasses, blue light glasses and contact lenses, through its DTC e-commerce and retail platform across five markets in the Middle East.
Now, the company has raised a $100 million Series C. The round, led by global growth investor General Atlantic, brings Eyewa’s total funding to $130 million since its launch in 2017.
Found it Anas Boumediene, Mahdi Al-Wadghiriand Abdullah Al-Raqeeb – All former Bain & Company consultants – Eyewa initially entered the eyewear market as an e-commerce retailer for third-party brands. However, the company soon launched its own brands after identifying unmet needs in the Middle East.
Between 2015 and 2017, co-CEOs Boumediene and Oudguirre led Foodpanda’s regional operations under the ownership of Rocket Internet and DeliveryHero. Their experience scaling their food delivery business – which they claim has grown 50-fold in three years and achieved profitability – motivated them to create their own company.
“After our time with Foodpanda, we got hooked on entrepreneurship and knew we wanted to start something of our own,” said co-CEO Boumediene on a call with TechCrunch. “We wanted to find the right problem to solve, so we started exploring ideas and comparing the challenges we saw in different regions.”
From delivering food to selling glasses
The founders brainstormed 87 ideas, and after filtering the options with a list of 15 criteria and conducting a six-month evaluation, they landed on the eyewear market, an industry very different from food delivery.
They discovered that the demand for glasses is increasing significantly, but the supply is not keeping pace. Myopia was increasing among the region’s relatively young population (one He studies The prevalence of myopia and high myopia in the UAE is shown to be approximately 27%. In addition, local eyewear companies focused on in-store sales, rarely did any e-commerce, and their brands were not affordable or tailored to the mass market.
With no previous experience in the eyewear industry, Eyewa began selling eyewear brands, including Ray-Ban, Gucci, Prada and Johnson & Johnson, online for two years.
By then, it had enough data about customer behavior, including shopping cart additions, website searches, and purchasing patterns, to design and launch its own in-house brands. Now, Eyewa has nine private label brands for diverse preferences, from older customers looking for functional eyewear to younger buyers looking for fashionable options. Currently, 96% of Eyewa’s revenue comes from these in-house brands, which, according to the company, has been key to keeping prices affordable for the mass market, including smaller cities across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman. .
Eyewa markets its eyeglasses, even prescription ones, as fashion accessories, unlike traditional retailers, which tend to treat customers as patients and sell expensive brands like Prada in sterile spaces.
“We have changed the way we look at the eyewear experience, where fashion is something that customers really care about from a choice perspective,” co-CEO Oudghiri commented on the call. “That’s what we focus on in the retail experience and the healthcare side, and we take care of it. We’ll give you high-quality lenses and do comprehensive eye tests, and we’ll make sure you’re getting the best health quality out of the eyewear that you’re purchasing. But what we want to enhance in the retail experience is fashion.”
Eyewa also keeps prices low: in the Gulf countries, the price of entry-level Eyewa glasses, including lenses, is around $100, roughly 50% less than similar products available in brick-and-mortar stores.
Expand your omnichannel experience
As an e-commerce platform, Eyewa caters exclusively to customers who already have prescriptions and know which eyeglasses they want. But this isn’t exactly mass market. So it began opening retail stores in December 2020 as coronavirus lockdowns slowly lifted.
This move has allowed it to reach a wider customer base, as most eyewear shoppers still prefer in-store experiences to try on frames and complete their purchases. This has also allowed Eyewa to capture the full customer journey by providing eye examinations, which can only take place in physical stores equipped with optometrists and examination rooms.
Eyewa raised a $21 million Series B from several investors, including Nuwa Capital and Endeavor Catalyst, in 2021 to scale these efforts, and since then, it has grown to 150 stores, all wholly owned and operated — with no franchises. The startup, which now employs 1,300 people, claims to be the largest eyewear brand in Saudi Arabia by number of stores and the fastest growing eyewear seller globally.
To put this growth in perspective: global benchmarks like Warby Parker took seven years to grow from their first store to 100 stores, and Lenskart in India took about six years to achieve the same feat.
“We are the fastest growing globally, but even across categories in… Gulf Cooperation Council countriesNo other retailer in any other sector has sold one to 100 stores in less than four years. “We executed it really, really fast,” Boumediene commented.
Boumediene declined to reveal the volume of glasses the company has sold since its launch, but he said Eyewa is profitable and growing more than 50% year-on-year in revenue. The company intends to add at least 100 additional stores in six countries, including Qatar, its next market, in 2025; It will also open a production facility and fulfillment center in Riyadh in the next quarter, the executive said.
With this round, General Atlantic joins a growing list of US investors working to deepen their presence in the GCC by supporting startups and establishing local teams, after receiving capital from the region’s sovereign wealth funds.
“There seems to be a lot of new global interest in the region. We have been developing the venture capital ecosystem in the last five years, and many early-stage investments have been made,” commented Mahdi. “But it’s great to now see more established growth and private equity funds starting to look to the region and the likes of General Atlantic coming in, and hopefully many more will follow.”
Badwa Capital and Turmeric Capital also participated in the round.
[ad_2]