42 Degrees - Business from a different angle

Shocked by the high street price of glasses, Jamie Murray Wells put a rocket up the industry when he started selling his own over the Internet.

If you read the national newspapers then you will probably have spotted the leaflets for Jamie Murray Wells' company Glasses Direct. The 25-year-old entrepreneur has recently raised £2.5m in venture capital funding and spent much of it on millions of 'inserts' – brochures in newspapers that list his product range and explain how he sells spectacles over the Internet at a tenth of high street prices.

Just four years after conceiving his business on computers in the library of the University of the West of England while sitting the final exams of his English degree, Murray Wells stands on the verge of revolutionising the £8bn-a-year optical equipment market dominated by four huge high street players.

His company is selling 500 pairs of glasses a day, and plans to double volumes in the near future. "I see no reason why we shouldn't eventually have a ten per cent share of the UK and US frames market," he says bullishly.

But he won't measure his success solely in terms of market share. "I'm not into starting up just another optician. I want a market-changing business. Once I've put dynamite under this industry, my aim is to do it to another, then another," he says. If it were almost any other 25 year old speaking, you would dismiss it as the sort of posturing tosh spouted by wannabe Apprentices. But Murray Wells is already walking the walk as well as talking the talk.

His idea is simple. Instead of going into a high street optician and paying for what he says are unjustified mark-ups, simply enter your prescription on the Internet, choose your frames, and Glasses Direct will supply you with your glasses, within a week, for as little as £15.

You can tell the idea is working, partly from the fact that he now has a multi-million-pound turnover and partly from the furious resistance he has met from the industry. "They tried to stop me getting supplies, they used legal action to stop me trading and they tried to keep me out of industry bodies such as the General Optical Council. But they failed. I'm still here and I'm after their business," he says cheerily.

In fact, he says, pressure from rivals trying to strangle his idea at birth has probably been his greatest challenge to date. "There was talk that the industry regulator, which was in league with the big players, might insist on face-to-face appointments for the sale of spectacles. That would have killed us stone dead. So for a long time, I was investing in a company which might not be trading in a few months time," says Murray Wells.

You might expect him to describe his eureka moment as the point when he first spotted the opportunity. "I had been studying for finals when I discovered I needed glasses," he says. "I was amazed to find that a couple of ounces of wire and glass would cost me £150. I just felt that someone somewhere was making a huge profit."

Predictably, no one wanted to tell him where the gold was buried. It is a mark of the industry's intense secrecy and Murray Wells' determination that it took him hundreds of phone calls to establish exactly what the margins on spectacles were: "I finally found someone who told me that my £150 glasses cost just £7 to make."

That merely confirmed Murray Wells' suspicion that there was an opportunity. But it wasn't the key moment because, even at the age of 21, he already had sufficient entrepreneurial experience to know that discovering business opportunities is not that difficult. "Finding a way to make them work is the real issue," he says.

Despite being educated at Harrow and being a friend of Prince William and Kate Middleton, Murray Wells was brought up to assume he had no right to any privileges. "A lot of well-off families have quite low expectations of their children," he says. "But both my parents were in business, and the ethos at home was always, 'Don't watch TV, get up and do something, be creative'. My father, in particular, used to get upset if he saw us slacking."

He describes himself as the kind of child who was always "trying to make a few bob – washing cars, or selling CDs in the playground." This entrepreneurial streak carried on at university, where he experimented with several business ideas before stumbling on Glasses Direct. "I investigated a small sports betting engine (on the Internet) for taking bets on things like polo or archery. But there was too much regulation."

He considered importing electrical scooters from the US. Then he looked at setting up a reverse auction site that would allow estate agents to bid for the chance to sell your house.

So, for him the turning point was not having the idea, but proving it could work. "After much searching, I found a lab in Blackpool which would deal with me," he explains. "I sent them my prescription and they sent me some glasses back within a week. It was probably the key moment in the development of Glasses Direct. It was only then that I knew I had figured out a business model that really worked."

Almost from that moment, growth was exponential. In the first couple of weeks, orders were just two pairs a day. Within a couple of months, the company had 8,000 orders and it just kept on growing.

Initially, Murray Wells ran the company from his parents' living room, although he did raise £750,000 in angel backing over the first three years. But in the past 18 months he raised first £3m, then another £2.5m, to fund major expansion. "The next stop is the USA," he says.

Yes, he adds, he is looking forward to being very, very rich. "I can't deny that money is a big motivator for me. But it's the security and independence it brings, not the cars, houses, holidays and meals. What really flicks my switch is having an effect, changing the world slightly through my ideas and hard work."