 "This German duo launched an eyewear brand in Indonesia")
When German entrepreneur Marc Uthay set his eyes on Southeast Asia in 2013, he thought the e-commerce market was already pretty cramped.
There was Rocket Internet’s everything store, Lazada – essentially an Amazon clone. Zalora, another Rocket-backed venture, specialised in fashion. On top of them, a range of local and foreign e-commerce start-ups offered everything from gadgets to shoes.
But after some research, Uthay did find a promising niche: eyewear.
The goal was to capture a chunk of the eyewear industry in Southeast Asia by selling online. Uthay got Christian Csermak on board to help kickstart the company in Southeast Asia. Csermak previously built a custom-made eyewear brand in Germany, called Mercy Would – with a concept similar to Warby Parker in the US.
Uthay’s and Csermak’s first milestone was to build Lensza, a one-stop shop for contact lenses and eye-care products. Lensza covers a broad range of lenses from different manufacturers, with an emphasis on coloured lenses, which are popular in Asia. They launched the site in early 2014. But the goal was never to build just an e-store.
Once Lensza was up and running, Uthay and Csermak drew up a concept for a new, Warby Parker-like fashion eyewear brand for the Indonesian market. They named it Franc Nobel. The first collection of frames launched in June.
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One challenge, Uthay says, is that people like to try out glasses before they commit to buying a pair. The start-up is testing various methods to address this.
Late last year, Uthay and Csermak raised a “low six-digit” round of seed funding from Crystal Horse Investments for their lens and eyewear ventures. For now, they are focusing on the Indonesian market.
This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.