The Challenge
Luxottica’s brands are household names. The independent optical practices that stock them are not a captive audience. They choose which portfolios to carry, and they make that choice on service as much as product. Luxottica’s teams needed a way to put brand information, seasonal assortments, and a real sales consultant in front of those practices quickly, without routing every request through an enterprise IT queue.
Starting Inside: A SharePoint Overhaul
The relationship began in 2018 with an internal Microsoft SharePoint overhaul, reorganizing how Luxottica’s own teams stored and found material. That project set the pattern for everything after it: understand the workflow first, then build something the team can keep current without us. It also put us in front of the internal sales support group, which is the reason the rest of this work exists.
Three Sites for the Independent Channel
We built three purpose-built sites aimed at independent eyecare professionals, two of which remain in service today.
Vision Premiere launched in 2021. It presented brand data and assets across the Luxottica portfolio and let customers request contact from a sales consultant or book an in-person appointment at Vision Expo West. Order and contact information was captured through a web form and written to a cloud-hosted spreadsheet on submission with no middleware, no additional license, no ticket. The site was retired around 2022 to 2023, having served the run of events it was built for.
The Vision Source Brand Guide has been running since 2020 and does the same job for Vision Source members, with a commerce layer added: members can preview pre-selected sun and optical ideal assortments directly, and request a sales consultation. The site organizes the full portfolio into tiers: core brands including Ray-Ban, Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley, and Costa, alongside the luxury and premium fashion houses such as Prada, Burberry, Versace, Coach, and Oliver Peoples.
The appointments site is deliberately plain on the surface and not plain underneath. A prospective wholesale customer submits an inquiry, and the submission is routed behind the scenes to the correct group of sales representatives based on the submitter’s state. The practice reaches a rep who actually covers their territory instead of a general inbox.
Built for Content That Never Stops Moving
Eyewear runs on seasons. New collections, updated catalogs, revised assortments, and time-boxed promotions arrive continuously, and every one of them is worthless to a sales team if it goes live a month late. We work on quick turnaround against requests that land whenever new material is published. Over the course of the engagement we have updated every brand on the Vision Source Brand Guide at one point or another.
Video for the PECAA Partnership
We also produced a tribute video for the Luxottica and PECAA partnership. PECAA, or Professional Eye Care Associates of America, is an alliance and buying group founded by independent optometrists around a mission of protecting and promoting private practice. That is the same audience these platforms serve, approached from the other direction.
The video was structured as a storybook with turning pages. Most pages held still images of the two organizations together over the years, at events in different cities. Others opened into embedded selfie videos from Luxottica reps speaking about PECAA and the length of the partnership. The format suited the subject: less a product story than a long relationship, told a page at a time.
The Result
Eight years in, we are the team Luxottica’s sales organization comes to when something needs to exist on the web and needs to exist soon. The engagement started with one internal contact and one SharePoint project, then spread to other teams by word of mouth, not through a procurement cycle, but because people told other people we were fast.