Food
When German entrepreneur Marc Uthay set his eyes on Southeast Asia in 2013, he thought the e-commerce market was already pretty cramped. There was Rocket Internet’s everything store, Lazada – essentially an Amazon clone. Zalora, another Rocket-backed venture, specialised in fashion. On top of them, a range of local and foreign e-commerce start-ups offered everything from gadgets to shoes.
But after some research, Uthay did find a promising niche: eyewear. He discovered that although millions of people in Southeast Asia need prescription glasses or contact lenses, the variety of brands and styles available was limited and the infrastructure to order online not well developed.
The goal was to capture a chunk of the eyewear industry in Southeast Asia by selling online. Uthay got Christian Csermak on board to help kickstart the company in Southeast Asia. Csermak previously built a custom-made eyewear brand in Germany, called Mercy Would – with a concept similar to Warby Parker in the US.
Uthay’s and Csermak’s first milestone was to build Lensza, a one-stop shop for contact lenses and eye-care products. Lensza covers a broad range of lenses from different manufacturers, with an emphasis on coloured lenses, which are popular in Asia. They launched the site in early 2014. But the goal was never to build just an e-store.
Once Lensza was up and running, Uthay and Csermak drew up a concept for a new, Warby Parker-like fashion eyewear brand for the Indonesian market. They named it Franc Nobel. The first collection of frames launched in June.
Currently, Franc Nobel’s frames are imported, but Uthay plans to bring the entire production to Indonesia in the near future.One challenge, Uthay says, is that people like to try out glasses before they commit to buying a pair. The start-up is testing various methods to address this.
Late last year, Uthay and Csermak raised a “low six-digit” round of seed funding from Crystal Horse Investments for their lens and eyewear ventures. For now, they are focusing on the Indonesian market. Expansion across the region could be tough, because similar concepts already exist in other markets.
One direct competitor in Southeast Asia is Four Eyes, which started in the Philippines in 2013 and is also available in Singapore. Another is Specsdirect in Malaysia.
