Responding to the Community
At Northwest Optical safety eyewear is part
of the environment
Responding to the
Community
At Northwest Optical, safety eyewear is part of the environment
ASHLAND, Wis.--Located here at the nexus of a busy watersports area near the Great Lakes and a region loved by cyclists and snowmobile enthusiasts, Northwest Optical has made dispensing prescription safety eyewear part of the everyday lives of its clientele, both for work and for play.
Mark Sneed, MD (l), and head optician Dennis DeCourcy have developed sports safety eyewear at Nrthwest Optical as a response to clientele needs.
Northwest Optical is the dispensing portion of the ophthalmology practice of Sneed and Associates. According to Mark Sneed, MD, the optical part of the practice is something that is not heavily promoted and operates fundamentally as a “community service” and that everything offered by the doctors and the opticians is a reflection of their patients’ collective needs, which has included personal and professional safety eyewear as a natural extension of their optical needs.
Sneed said that while safety eyewear has always been part of the picture at the 40-year-old practice, serving the corporate community within a 150-mile radius has been a more recent development of the past decade. About 2 percent of Northwest Optical’s business is corporate prescription safety eyewear (SRx), out of a total safety eyewear business of 5 to 6 percent. One to 2 percent is sports safety eyewear, and the remainder personal safety eyewear for individuals.
Dennis DeCourcy, manager and head optician at Northwest Optical, said the corporate safety work began when one of the labs they use, Twin City Optical, proposed it. The lab drew up contracts with local businesses and Northwest provided the dispensing services. Clients include Bretting Manufacturing, with 300 to 400 employees, as well as Northland College and Excel Energies. Local competition includes three opticians here, but “most safety work comes to us by word of mouth,” said Sneed.
Meeting the sports safety eyewear needs of Northwest Optical’s clientele is “something I have developed over the past couple of years,” DeCourcy told VM, responding to patients asking about special glasses for cycling and kayaking. DeCourcy and another optician are strongly versed in sports eyewear, and “right now in our dispensary, all the doctors are familiar with it.” While the area is a travel destination for biking, boating, canoeing, snowmobiles and ATVs, only a few customers are walk-ins on vacation, since “we don’t promote the optical dispensary much,” he added.
In addition to patients with specific athletic eyewear needs, Northwest also dispenses SRx to locals who work with chainsaws and motorized gardening equipment.
Patient education has been the major reason safety eyewear has grown and been maintained at Northwest. People have noticed that “materials are standing up better now than they used to,” DeCourcy noted. Creating a special sports eyewear section in the dispensary, and devoting more design and display to safety, has also helped. According to Sneed, one fifth of Northwest Optical’s frame inventory is sports eyewear, representing six manufacturers.
DeCourcy, who once worked for polycarbonate lens manufacturer VisionˇEase, noted that “Polycarbonate has just gone off the board,” and said that polycarbonate is now in 80 percent of their SRx jobs, up from 10 percent two years ago, compared to plastic, which was in 80 percent of SRx jobs two years ago, and is now, with high-index lenses, down to 19 percent.
Pricing is another reason why SRx in polycarbonate has succeeded. “We heavily discount the safety eyewear compared to regular eyewear. Patients realize their regular eyewear can last longer if the second pair is discounted,” DeCourcy said. Also, plastic and polycarbonate are priced identically, so patients who have experienced problems with scratch resistance and chipping with plastic lenses have fewer qualms about transitioning over to polycarbonate.
Northwest divides its work among three labs--Twin City Optical (which does most of the safety and sports eyewear jobs), Prescription Optical and Spectrum Optical. DeCourcy said in a busy practice like theirs, doing any lab work in-house was “not worth our while.” Instead, he noted, “we have settled on these labs due to great quality work, fast turnaround [usually three days], and fair pricing. We’ve also seen an increase in quality at these labs related to lab invesment in current lens processing technology.”
--Seth J. Bookey
Volume Number: 19:09 Issue: 8/15/2005
At Northwest Optical, safety eyewear is part of the environment
ASHLAND, Wis.--Located here at the nexus of a busy watersports area near the Great Lakes and a region loved by cyclists and snowmobile enthusiasts, Northwest Optical has made dispensing prescription safety eyewear part of the everyday lives of its clientele, both for work and for play.
Mark Sneed, MD (l), and head optician Dennis DeCourcy have developed sports safety eyewear at Nrthwest Optical as a response to clientele needs.
Northwest Optical is the dispensing portion of the ophthalmology practice of Sneed and Associates. According to Mark Sneed, MD, the optical part of the practice is something that is not heavily promoted and operates fundamentally as a “community service” and that everything offered by the doctors and the opticians is a reflection of their patients’ collective needs, which has included personal and professional safety eyewear as a natural extension of their optical needs.
Sneed said that while safety eyewear has always been part of the picture at the 40-year-old practice, serving the corporate community within a 150-mile radius has been a more recent development of the past decade. About 2 percent of Northwest Optical’s business is corporate prescription safety eyewear (SRx), out of a total safety eyewear business of 5 to 6 percent. One to 2 percent is sports safety eyewear, and the remainder personal safety eyewear for individuals.
Dennis DeCourcy, manager and head optician at Northwest Optical, said the corporate safety work began when one of the labs they use, Twin City Optical, proposed it. The lab drew up contracts with local businesses and Northwest provided the dispensing services. Clients include Bretting Manufacturing, with 300 to 400 employees, as well as Northland College and Excel Energies. Local competition includes three opticians here, but “most safety work comes to us by word of mouth,” said Sneed.
Meeting the sports safety eyewear needs of Northwest Optical’s clientele is “something I have developed over the past couple of years,” DeCourcy told VM, responding to patients asking about special glasses for cycling and kayaking. DeCourcy and another optician are strongly versed in sports eyewear, and “right now in our dispensary, all the doctors are familiar with it.” While the area is a travel destination for biking, boating, canoeing, snowmobiles and ATVs, only a few customers are walk-ins on vacation, since “we don’t promote the optical dispensary much,” he added.
In addition to patients with specific athletic eyewear needs, Northwest also dispenses SRx to locals who work with chainsaws and motorized gardening equipment.
Patient education has been the major reason safety eyewear has grown and been maintained at Northwest. People have noticed that “materials are standing up better now than they used to,” DeCourcy noted. Creating a special sports eyewear section in the dispensary, and devoting more design and display to safety, has also helped. According to Sneed, one fifth of Northwest Optical’s frame inventory is sports eyewear, representing six manufacturers.
DeCourcy, who once worked for polycarbonate lens manufacturer VisionˇEase, noted that “Polycarbonate has just gone off the board,” and said that polycarbonate is now in 80 percent of their SRx jobs, up from 10 percent two years ago, compared to plastic, which was in 80 percent of SRx jobs two years ago, and is now, with high-index lenses, down to 19 percent.
Pricing is another reason why SRx in polycarbonate has succeeded. “We heavily discount the safety eyewear compared to regular eyewear. Patients realize their regular eyewear can last longer if the second pair is discounted,” DeCourcy said. Also, plastic and polycarbonate are priced identically, so patients who have experienced problems with scratch resistance and chipping with plastic lenses have fewer qualms about transitioning over to polycarbonate.
Northwest divides its work among three labs--Twin City Optical (which does most of the safety and sports eyewear jobs), Prescription Optical and Spectrum Optical. DeCourcy said in a busy practice like theirs, doing any lab work in-house was “not worth our while.” Instead, he noted, “we have settled on these labs due to great quality work, fast turnaround [usually three days], and fair pricing. We’ve also seen an increase in quality at these labs related to lab invesment in current lens processing technology.”
--Seth J. Bookey
Volume Number: 19:09 Issue: 8/15/2005
Posted: Fri - August 19, 2005 at 07:43 AM
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