Mr Martens, you are the founder and CEO of Edel-Optics, a leading online optician for in particular designer eyewear. What distinguishes your business from the growing competition in the industry?

In a nutshell, our USPs are the technical innovations from in-house development, the extent of our internationalisation, our retail concept through which we connect smoothly online and offline and through which we are in the process of gaining a foothold in over-the-counter-trade, and last but not least, our clear positioning as a retail brand for designer glasses as a fashion and lifestyle accessory. With our testimonial we are further honing our profile and we are of course creating exclusivity at the product level, which emphasises our differentiation from the competition.

Let’s start with the retail concept you mentioned. Among other things, the store concept was awarded the Retail Technology Awards Europe in the Best Customer Experience category at Euroshop 2014. Why is your solution so attractive for the retail sector?

The integration of sales channels is currently a much discussed topic in retail. There are a number of exciting approaches. The synergies that we generate from our special combination of online and offline sales are the Virtual Merchandiser’s special feature. This is to the benefit of the customers who visit the store, because they get the best of both worlds: the selection, search functions and prices of the Internet, but at the same the service and advice of an optician shop. As a retailer, we are able to process the logistics very efficiently and reduce the capital tie-up, because we use our inventory twice. Our highly consistent, well-designed implementation of the concept, which has the iPad at its centre, certainly also plays a role in the positive feedback we receive. When you look at it, you can see very quickly that we are not half-hearted in our approach to the whole thing.

At the end of 2013 you opened a flagship store in the Alstertal shopping centre in Hamburg, the largest shopping centre in northern Germany. There you are in direct competition with the big chain stores, such as Fielmann, Apollo, Krass and Bode, all of which are also represented there. What do you have planned for year no. 3?

We quite deliberately entered a situation where we would be in a position to compete with the established chain stores, because we wanted to demonstrate that we can hold our own with our concept and our business model. Right from the start, the response was magnificent. We managed to break even and proved that we can make a profit in the top echelon with our range of designer eyewear at very reasonable Internet prices. We can hardly imagine better proof of practice for our concept and we can now derive benchmarks for further expansion of stationary trade.

So is the concept scalable? The principle of the flagship store is, after all, based on the entire range being made available from the central warehouse of the online shops. How would one envision this with a network of branches?

The idea is basically to establish a decentralised storage system via the Edel-Optics stores and then to have the possibility of offering for example same-day delivery. The growing online business also justifies a proportionally expanded inventory, which is distributed among the newly opening shops. Thus by making use of the sales areas as decentralised warehousing at the same time, we can always guarantee a magnitude of available stock of glasses that considerably exceeds the range of merely chain stores – especially when it comes to designer glasses. In addition to the Internet prices, this is a key selling point of Edel-Optics. Whether every shop will eventually be able to compete with the range of the current store, remains to be seen.

Edel-Optics is already present in 53 countries with its own webshop. Such broad local diversification is very rare, even in large corporations. What led to this strategy?

Our self-developed platform allowed for very efficient and rapid internationalisation. It made it simple for us to connect more domains and manage the variety of languages, currencies and payment methods with relatively little effort. We were therefore able to expand profitably even if we had a minimal market share in some areas. The advantage was and is that we have already cut our teeth when we now gradually develop individual markets in more depth. In addition, we have frequently been the first mover in the online optics business, which in the long term gives us a competitive advantage.

Why do you think that Edel-Optics as a retail brand can be successful internationally?

Through our technological developments we create tangible added value for our customers, such as transparency and emancipation when they buy prescription glasses via the Digital Optician and favourable prices through our Best Price tool, which automatically scans the competition several times a day and adjusts our offers accordingly. We are also developing an edgy brand profile that clearly positions us in the fashion and lifestyle segment: with a selection of over 20,000 designer glasses on site, our flagship store is undoubtedly the Mecca of eyewear in Germany and far beyond. Our sponsorship of the Hamburg Towers basketball team is a statement about youth culture and trends. The exclusive eyewear collection that we market with our high-profile testimonial, style icon and international star gets to the heart of all that and directs the public interest to “SEE AND BE SEEN”.