The Right Vision: Lenskart Co-founder and CEO Peyush Bansal is the Uncrowned Poster Boy of Progressive Eyewear

I visited Bangkok roughly about two years ago on holiday and was casually roaming around in centralwOrld, when a few people from India came up to me and said we really need to open Lenskart here and that it will do very well. That triggered the first thought and served as an impetus for where we are today.

Additionally, when we acquired OWNDAYS in 2022, I got to know the market a little better, and saw there’s a chain here — a mass chain, but they are largely selling branded products. So, I thought to myself about how people here seem to want fashion. And, somebody in Lenskart’s model, as we look at in India, is like a neighbourhood model. The collections are also very versatile. You can change glasses every week if you want to, and I think more than anywhere else in the world, Thailand is ready for this. And this is something I personally like about Lenskart. I just have to make it available to them. We are not thinking small, and are looking at Thailand as a few hundred stores market in the near future.

The ideology is simple: In every market we go to, we develop styles of a different kind. Our model is centred around our biggest USP — the styles we offer. People buy our eyewear for our range and styles. If you go to Singapore right now, the overlap between India and Singapore is zero. We do a 100% unique collection as per the Singapore market. As we come to Thailand, I think there will be some overlap as a lot of the Singapore products can be sold here. But I am assuming 50-60 percent of the collection will be different. I also believe whatever Thailand can adopt, Singapore will need a few years to adopt. We like pushing the bar, and Thailand is a viable market in terms of product quality and range. We don’t compromise on quality. So yes, I do foresee a positive development here.

In India, almost 50-60 percent of consumers know us, and 50-60 percent of them are buying from us, which means we have one fourth of the market share. Our plans in Thailand are very similar. We will go deep; we will establish e-commerce here because I believe Thailand as a market is readier than Singapore for e-commerce, from whatever I have carefully observed. We are also setting up a factory here, a supply chain. We will work towards fast delivery and very affordable high fashion. We plan on opening omnichannel stores, which is going to be a lot faster here. And we’ll go beyond the malls.

Overall, our approach is to not go to many markets. We go to select ones, like we entered Singapore almost six years back, pre-COVID. We’ve had ample opportunity to go to many Southeast Asian markets, but we refrain from doing so because we like to either be a number one player in the market or we just don’t want to be there.

In all honesty, there’s a huge influx of people globally who have never gotten their eyes checked, and they clearly have a vision correction requirement. Moreover, if you look around, there is so much innovation that has happened across categories like apparel, accessories, and shoes from 20 years ago. What we could get today versus what we did decades ago is miles apart. It has gone three cycles of what I’d like to call a disruption revolution.

However, eyewear has kind of stayed the same. So, it’s true that there is a gap for people to really enjoy their eyewear, and there are so many people coming out and wearing bold eyewear today, asking for different eyewear for different purposes, utilities, and occasions. And this is not just an Indian phenomenon. It’s global.

This, according to me, has been one of my biggest takeaways from being so invested in this industry.

I think firstly you need to crack the home market. If you want to grow a company, it comes with a lot of personal discipline. You have to be at the office at a certain time, you need to do meetings at a certain time, and you need to give time to certain things at a certain time. In all, innovation cannot be compromised. It’s almost like if you are preparing for the Olympics, you need to train with a certain regime. Building a company, whether in India or internationally, particularly requires the same. There’s no shortcut. You cannot assume you will sit at home and everything will just be okay. Personally, I wouldn’t go international in the early stages of running a business because there’s this niggling feeling that you are not building something powerful in the home market. Like at Lenskart, we are a very experimentative company.

But, when we went to Singapore initially, it was not a warm welcome. People there like to have everything planned years in advance, you know? However, incorporating that would slow down our pace of innovation. I would tell those founders to send some people from their home market to the international market to run the business. It’s imperative for the DNA transfer to happen before taking that big leap.

In the early 2000s, people were not as keen on sporting glasses. Most people wanted to wear contacts instead. I think everyone today knows that you can create an edgy personality – there’s so much you can do with the right pair of glasses! And it has nothing to do with not making you look stylish anymore. I really doubt that people will compromise with looks for too long. In the short term, yes. In the long term, no. You can’t build ugly smart eyewear or one style smart eyewear. Even if it is not ugly, it needs to allow for change to be sustained in the market today.

I’m still figuring out and streamlining things by building a team. As far as coming on Shark Tank is concerned, I usually wrap that up in five weekends. So, in a way, yes, 99 percent of my time still goes to work since building a global business is very difficult. You have to come to the ground and rebuild everything that you’ve done so far. But unless I can alter the thought process and inspire these people to build something big, it won’t happen. That’s why the journey is very, very time-consuming. It’s not a cut copy-paste situation. I think, obviously, it starts with hiring great people at the store. It starts with a lot of discipline to fuel a vision of global expansion.

Post Shark Tank, I have started building this whole foray of brands for Lenskart. We started investing in the D2C space. We bought a brand in France, and we are right now working on a few more brand acquisitions. We have curated a kid’s D2C in-house brand called Hooper. Then we created Hustler.

A personal understanding of the power of what several D2C brands are doing currently and the fact that some of them will go on to become brands of the future came from Shark Tank. And, I’m seeing people are beginning to buy into brands, which were very small earlier, that are becoming big just in the D2C space. So, the same investment into eyewear we also started. That is when we bought OWNDAYS. Another key takeaway I learned from Shark Tank is that things can happen at a very low cost and much faster pace than at what we were operating. A two person company can be doing a few million dollars of business without any capital. And this is happening in India.

So, when you look at those, you are inspired to challenge yourself and say, “Okay, if they can do it, why are we not able to do it?” We’ve either kind of gotten spoiled or made peace with the status quo. Or have created internal barriers. Lastly, I’ve finally begun to understand that real talent is actually hungry with a yearning for growth. I would say that the people who can really bring about a transformation are not the people who are sitting in the biggest of the cities and have access to the best of the colleges. For instance, I invested in a company called Spandan, which is based out of Dehradun.

I don’t think the founder went to IIT, but he has developed the world’s most portable ECG machine, whereas when we are looking for talent, you’re like, okay, who went to IIT who went to NIT, who’s sitting in this company, who’s working for Google and so on. What those people don’t have is hunger and a crazy mindset of transformation. What somebody in a small town may have is a different and determined thought process and hunger, so they are actually learning. Much of this observation and learning has come through Shark Tank. Because what comes into Shark Tank would never reach the VC world, the news, or the private equity world. And, that’s the sheer beauty of it.

Lenskart has three stores — Zpell Future Park Rangsit, Central Westgate, and Central Chaengwattana — across Bangkok, currently.