Specscart has cut prescription glasses turnaround from two weeks to 24 hours by bringing lens glazing in-house, disrupting eyewear industry norms.
A two-week wait for a new pair of glasses has long been treated as unavoidable in the UK optical industry. Manchester-based eyewear brand Specscart says it has cut that down to 24 hours for most single-vision prescriptions, and to 30 minutes for customers who order and collect in person at its Bury store.
The company, a direct-to-consumer omni-channel brand, achieved this by building its own lens stock and glazing operation rather than relying on third-party labs. Specscart now holds lens powers from -12 to +6 in-house, which it describes as the widest lens bank of any UK retailer.
The standard industry process looks very different. Most opticians only order a customer’s exact lenses after a sale is confirmed, then ship the frame out to a third-party facility for glazing, a round trip that typically takes one to two weeks, and often longer for online-only retailers without their own lab. Much of that delay traces back to a broader shift in UK manufacturing: the domestic supply chain for lenses and finished eyewear has largely moved offshore over the past several decades.
Founder Sid Sethi said the company set out to trace exactly where in the supply chain those delays were being created.
“Most major eyewear retailers have outsourced glazing to Asia. That supply chain left decades ago, and pretending otherwise doesn’t hold up,” Sethi said. “What we could change to achieve faster turnaround time and better control over quality: the stocking, the glazing, the fitting. That’s not glamorous, but it’s the only part that was ever going to get someone their glasses in a day instead of two weeks.”
According to Sethi, the company worked backwards from the customer-facing problem, turnaround time, to identify the actual bottleneck. Then he made the decision to bring stocking and glazing in-house rather than optimising around an outsourced process. That shift now underpins most of Specscart’s single-vision dispatch times.
The move also lands at a moment when the wider UK optical sector is grappling with a shortage of qualified glazing and dispensing staff. The formal apprenticeship route for dispensing opticians only received General Optical Council approval to recruit apprentices in July 2024, making it one of the newer standardised training pathways in UK healthcare-adjacent retail. Pay in the field remains modest relative to the skill required: the Association of British Dispensing Opticians’ 2026 Pay and Reward Survey puts the average full-time dispensing optician’s salary at £33,056 a year.
Specscart is a Manchester-based, fully bootstrapped D2C omni-channel eyewear brand, selling online and through its Manchester stores. The company remains bootstrapped and has taken no external investment to date.
