POINT OF VIEW THE INDEPENDENT OPTICIAN

The Independent Optician

A future to be reinvented

Franca Bochicchio Ottica & Glasstylist ® DIECIDECIMI ® – Milano Blogger glasstylist.com, founder of Radio Ottica

It was October 29 and the first time that I had attended an event dedicated to Design and future perspectives. On the stage of the NEXT event, organized by Altagamma, a foundation that has been promoting Italian excellence, uniqueness and lifestyle since 1992, there were incredible world-famous people who were interchanging and confronting each other on the theme of the future of creativity and design. In that moment, no one could have imagined that the immediate future would have provided such a different perspective to observe our familiar world or could have envisaged such remote and improbable scenarios. Well, in my short script, the purpose being to share my personal experience of this period, I started right from a phrase by Buckminister Fuller that I jotted down in the notebook of that event in which I participated, ironically, together with Isabella Morpurgo, the director of this magazine which today hosts my thoughts:

“The best way to predict future is to design it”.

The deterioration of the situation between the event that I had organized in my shop on February 22 for the celebration of the fiftieth MIDO anniversary, which failed exactly in those hours, and March 11 when I decided to close my shop in the heart of Milan, brought upon me an unbearable psychological condition, where I could only accept the lockdown reality that lay before me. Trying to soothe my personal anxieties and fears, together with those of my frightened man cubs, was very stressful. Sharing this condition with everything and everyone created a survival instinct in me that quickly transformed into the RadiO-Optics experience. Suddenly, we were all at home, unprepared behind cell phones and PCs, listening to terrible news, with a sense of impotence, difficult to cope with. Those free hours which were previously sacrificed to the job, to which years had been dedicated, no longer created that sense of lightheartedness as in the past.

For this reason, I decided to explode the eyeglass world that I had learned to love through the voice of its protagonists (manufacturers, designers, agents, opticians, professionals in the sector), inviting them to chat about their history and their passion, both to me and those who followed us from home, thereby keeping that world alive and we with it. From a personal observation that the world would have totally changed outside whilst we were closed inside our homes, I followed my desire, without thinking twice, to take with me whatever I would never have wanted to leave behind. The feeling was very similar to when in an extreme situation they ask you to gather the things you cannot do without and for me, as far as work was concerned, this did not include material things but a world made of immaterial values creating authentic products, such as passion, trust, sincerity, loyalty. The aim was to hold out together and drag that world behind us, even by force if necessary. The sharing experience transformed itself day by day, allowing us, as insiders, to speak transversally, in the presence of end users, not only of the past of the optics sector, but also of the present, on which we had the opportunity to reflect, and of the future, to be planned for the better.

The RadiO-Ottica experience that still continues as a trait d’union with a moment that has created “a before” and “an after” in both our personal and working lives, has taught me a great deal and, in addition to having saved me, has also exposed me to the criticisms of those who thought that I had nothing better to do, that I had no dear ones to look after nor pizzas to knead. In times of significant change, there is always someone who is interested in maintaining a previous status quo, but history teaches us that we cannot go back, if not more informed. What better situation to focus on crucial points in the optics sector and try to take the opportunity to shed some light? We have not yet waded this river, indeed we are still in a dangerous undertow that is likely to suck us in, but I am happy that RadiO-Ottica and its talks have influenced and contaminated so as to speak of “value” before “sale” in the optics sector, but this is only the beginning.

What future have we tried to draw in our open-hearted chats? What to keep and what to change? What to bet on? Aware that from shared thoughts and opinions and from comparison, ideas and beliefs arise from which the

steps of the imminent future move on; these are some important points on which we have focused.

The production of frames wherever, should not exclude the concept of commercial honesty in declaring the real origin of the products. In no uncertain terms, the end user has the right to this information to make an informed purchase and, even before them, the opticians have the right, who guarantee that product with their choice.

The production chain of Italian optics, Italian pride and a great resource of the entire territory, deserves a more stringent law on Made in Italy than the actual one, which only guarantees 45% of the production of the prevailing processing on the Italian territory, opening up in fact to a very wide range of non-Italian products. A law of 2009, however, allows manufacturers who carry out all the processing in Italy to declare 100% Made in Italy when presenting their products. Why isn’t this done? Why is there no interest in this sense after more than 10 years from this law?

Commercial agents in the optics sector, an important connecting role between companies and opticians, can be identified as true brand ambassadors. Their dedication, product knowledge and training are fundamental to explode the value of the product they convey on the market. Knowing them better, listening to them and enhancing them is necessary in order to better protect, transmit and turn that value to the end client. Their stories have given a dimension of how the collaboration between the various figures winding along the supply chain is fundamental in this sector if we want to keep it alive.

The optician is the figure we have examined and discussed with greater force, also because a future failing to focus on the role of the optician in this sector would lead to another reality, made up of great players who dominate without having to preserve any roles or chains of value, since their interest is to focus straight on the end user. We are still living in a hybrid situation where the division between professions is increasingly clear: opticians who choose to be guided in their choices, leaving considerable space to large companies and opticians who instead want to preside over all areas of their prerogative. Without any intention of creating rankings of merit or importance, we talked about the second category that we identify as independent opticians by choice. The mistake that is often made is to associate the concept of independence with independent products instead of to a modus operandi of the optician, a personal predisposition to freedom of action in one’s business. Independent products, i.e. unrelated to certain main stream logics, cannot identify a role on their own even though they may be a more natural choice. A comparison with the many optical colleagues who have participated in various ways from every side of the peninsula, has allowed us to clarify this important topic, still too contaminated today by those who have an interest in appropriating the category by placing themselves as an indispensable filter for the success of the company. Different, instead, are the figures of real consultants who assist the optician’s work in the background, without the need for spotlights, helping him to maintain and preserve his central role, even more fundamental in the near future.

The end user, his awareness, the care of his information, the trust that the future optician who really wants to do this wonderful job has yet to gain, this was the real focal point and common thread that accompanied and held together the RadiO-Ottica talks, as you cannot imagine a world that does not consider people in every area, at every level, at every step, before, during and after products, interests, business and advantages. This is the world that we wanted to attract and project into the future with RadiO-Ottica to the cry of “beauty will save the world”, that beauty declined in all its forms and above all in the expression of it’s being, which naturally contributes to achieving a greater harmony. This is the imprinting with which we will continue. Always.