| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1988 |
| Headquarters | Nottingham, England |
| Employees | > 5,000 |
| Parent | Grand Vision |
| Website | www.visionexpress.com |
Vision Express is one of the four major opticians that control 70% of the British market for spectacles and contact lenses.[1]
The company opened its first store in 1988 at the MetroCentre. After buying out LensCrafters' UK base, they further increased their number of stores. They had over 220 stores across the UK by 2007. There are now over 330 stores throughout the UK and Republic of Ireland.
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Stores are divided into four types: Optical Lab, Superstores, Franchises (owned entirely by the proprietor but under licence to use the Vision Express name and with some access to Grand Vision services) and Joint Ventures (premises owned entirely by proprietor, but setup cost subsidised by Vision Express).
The first two types of store which provide a one hour service using both semi-finished lenses (prescription being cut from scratch) and stock lenses. The JV stores tend to provide an overnight service also, with some exceptions. A new One Hour On Demand service has recently been introduced to the company, whereby if a customer would like their spectacles back within the hour they pay a £5 express charge, otherwise the job will be ready the next day. This has been brought in to effect to stagger the amount of jobs any one lab would be expected to carry out at one time.
Their headquarters are in Lenton, Nottingham.
Grand Vision acquired Vision Express in 1997. The French parent company Grand Vision has stores under various brands across Europe, and the rest of the world. Its rivals in UK include Specsavers, Boots Opticians and Dollond & Aitchison. Under franchise agreement there is a strong Vision Express brand present also in Latvian and Lithuanian markets. These shops were acquired from GrandVision by Latvian entrepreneurs of "LU Optometrijas Centrs SIA".
Vision express offers digital retinal photography. This involves making a digital image of the back of the eyes. It allows the optometrist to record in detail the structures of the back of the eye. When a succession of images have been built up over several visits, small changes at the back of the eye can be more easily detected.
In September 2010 it was reported that blog spam comments were appearing online that were trying to promote Vision Express[2] for SEO purposes. The blog spam attempting to promote VisionExpress.com with a link for the keyword "eye test". The Wikipedia page for Vision Express had also been edited to try and promote "eye tests" and "opticians" in the External Links section as promotional links back to the VisionExpress.com website. In both instances, the links would have automatically being tagged with nofollow, which according to Google means the links would have been of little benefit for ranking purposes anyway[3].