True confessions of an eyeball doctor-Part 2

{Part 2} Mi confesión… 

Before I tell you why La Vida decided to offer our eyewear exclusively through a trusted network of eye care professionals and retailers, I have a bigger confession to make. 

I started out wanting to do the total opposite. Not compromise, of course, but make our eyeglasses available right from our website. I mean that’s what the cool kids are doing, right? My dream was for La Vida Eyewear to be the online eyeglasses retailer for Latinx, by Latinx. (Hot, right?) 

La Vida fills a gap in the eyewear industry. The major manufacturers base most eyeglasses around features and skin tones that is more European. Until now, the rest of us simply had to make do with poor fit and frame designs and colors that didn’t quite complement our skin tone or fashion…. Not cool.  

As a Latina optometrist who styles patients daily, this was muy frustrating. That is why I started designing La Vida eyewear: to challenge the status quo by offering eyewear designed especially for mi gente, by someone who gets our unique needs, intimately. 

The next logical step was to set up shop online to reach as many people as possible. I started investigating everything there is to know about selling eyewear online. 

Something you should know about me is that I am a total research nerd. If I am interested in a topic, or have a specific goal in mind, I gather every bit of information about it that I can. That’s just how I roll. That’s how I learned that, inquiring with manufacturer after manufacturer, no one was committed to serving the Latinx population at a level that satisfied me—or my clients’ needs. 

The more and more research I did on selling glasses online, however, the more I discovered that Ojo! Problema grande… 

[Read on to learn more…]