Optica Life Accessories' Halie Riley, Brent Rundle, Samantha Price and Tom Nichol at ODMA25

With a brand-new catalogue, a streamlined website and newly organised, simple-to-understand product ranges, including its bespoke case, cloth and lens cleaner packages, Optica Life Accessories was celebrating months of hard work to make everything much simpler for customers at ODMA25.

“We’re quite excited about it,” said Tom Nichol, managing director of Optica. “We’ve repositioned and relaunched our look… we’ve got everything aligned and we've expanded the range, so we are truly that one-stop shop.” The company’s catalogue and website now clearly sets out Optica’s bespoke branding propositions, he said, including its:

• Logo Luxe range, which allows practices to quickly order cases, microfibre cloths and even lens cleaners, embossed with the practice’s name and logo, in a range of sizes and colours
• Picture Perfect range, allowing a practice to incorporate a picture or image that is iconic to that practice
• Bespoke Branded range, fully customisable to a practice with internal and external messaging as specified by the practice.

Though these product options have been available for a couple of years, the options and stages involved are now all clearly detailed in the new brochure and on the website, and they have really begun to take off, said Nichol, with 20% of practices now choosing Picture Perfect, for example, to immortalise where they are based for customers.

More and more practices are realising bespoke accessories, like cases and cloths, are a branding opportunity that helps set them apart, he said. “It’s a good way to stay relevant in their customer’s mind and it can be a conversation starter – you might go to a dinner party and put your case on the table and someone starts talking about the picture and all of a sudden you’re talking about your favourite optometrist and the practice has a new customer.”

As well as simplifying its custom-product ranges, Optica has also expanded its workshop, tools and equipment range since buying and incorporating Eyeline Optical in Oct 2022, said Nichol, all of which has also been far more clearly set out in the new catalogue and online. “We've got a lot more products to offer customers… So we are trying to make it as easy as possible. We’ve got everything listed on our website and we’re sitting on more stock so, if it’s the bigger sellers, it’s a really quick turnaround.”

Optica is also the exclusive Australasian distributor for Centrostyle, which has more than 10,000 stock keeping units, so it can cater to even the most weird and wonderful practice requests, he said. “We get requests for all sorts of things we didn’t know existed; it’s quite cool!” Even the magnifiers part of the business has been given an overhaul, he added, with new products, a simplified supply chain and a new website.

It’s all really cohesive now, said Nichol. “It shows a bit more about who we are on the inside, so our customers understand what we are doing and why we do it; that we truly are that one-stop.”