Around 11 years ago, dark clouds loomed on the horizon for Clyde Optical Company.

The company cuts optical lenses to fit frames for opticians – a practice known as glazing. But in 1990, its client base suddenly threatened to dry up.

Managing director Drew McDonald (42) explained: “The market place for opticians changed in the late 80s. A lot of bigger players such as Vision Express moved in and as a result the people who had been our customers looked at copying them.”

Many smaller opticians felt the need to compete with offers of one-hour service and set up their own back-of-shop, lens-fitting operations.

Drew said: “We had to do something because there was a real danger that we would end up taking two steps forward and three back.”

But confident he could ride the storm, Drew decided to expand, creating a lens grinding company Lensfast to supply Clyde Optical with prescription lenses. It worked because he knew that it took a tight ship to make this type of business profitable.

“It is a very tight margin business – I have to run things like a Swiss watch. So a lot of our customers who decided to do their own thing have come back to us,” explained Drew.

On top of that many opticians realised that although clients appreciated a prompt service, which Clyde delivers, there was no overwhelming demand for a one-hour turn-around.

Having successfully come out the other side of those changing times, both companies which employ a total staff of 24, are going from strength to strength at their shared base in Rutherglen Industrial Estate.

Lensfast now produces between 800 and 1,000 lenses a day making it the single biggest production unit of its kind in Scotland. The lenses are cut to prescription requirements with accuracy to a tenth of a millimetre before being smoothed and polished.

About 25 per cent of the lenses Clyde Optical buys come from Lensfast. That has the potential to increase after a business loan from South Lanarkshire Council helped with the purchase of new machinery including a lens generator.

“We could now increase production by 50 per cent before more machinery is required. When you are making things, growth has to be very structured and planned and this type of funding has been very useful,” said Drew.

As the companies grow, Drew envisages more business coming from further afield. For local orders he has a driver to dispatch lenses to opticians in Glasgow and the surrounding area. But he also safely packages lenses in Jiffy bags and sends them round Britain with the help of a specialist courier firm.

Drew said: “The beauty of it is that the courier can deliver next day to anywhere in Britain so I can look elsewhere for more business as we grow.”

Business South Lanarkshire - Summer/ Autumn 2001

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