in 2016 ranata made a small investment in a growing IA startup little did he know that this company would not only become one of his biggest competitors but also become 5x bigger than a brand from the mighty House of tatas themselves this is the first story in our new profitable startup series on the growthx wif frame we'll go deep into learning how lenscart became the iare market leader despite starting 3 years later than Titan i+ to now owning 5x of Titans entire Market segment I'll tell you four core problems that lenscart solved to get her but as with everything growex let me give you some cext first see the year is 2010 a time when most of the iare space in India is unorganized in fact it still is by the way but at that time no one was even thinking of purchasing brand new spectacles see when it came to a chashma Indians usually relied on their nearest ey shop unle it's like the iar industry has been pretty much like the restro or the clothing industry where the unorganized sector still rules the market even today More than 70% market share in iware is owned by the unorganized SP but what's interesting here is that P bunel the founder was not an expert in this space he literally knew nothing about spectacles in fact he was an electrical engineer working at Microsoft in the USA some can say that a dream job for a lot of techies in India but a major light bulb went off for him when one day he visited Bill Gates's house and heard Bill Gates talking about changing the world and some new ideas that he was working on this is the moment he knew he needed to start something of his own if he wants to create a big change in this world so P comes back to India and starts working from his garage his first company was not lens card but something called search my campus it was a site focused on classifi for college students looking for jobs accommodation car pool all of those things and things were going fine but he realized that this was not the big change that he left his hying job in Microsoft and the US for so he started something called flyer.com flyer was the very first version of lenscart but it was only Built for the US markets and the idea was simple they would distribute orders among their dealers and they shipped it to their customers in the US but this was not big enough for peush and this is when he met his co-founders Amit and Sumit this Trio created value Technologies the idea add value to customers lives by eliminating retailers yeah value they wanted to be bullish on India and the e-commerce wave that was about to hit the country so they created an e-commerce platform with multiple Brands Jewels card watch card back card and lens card lenscart came here so while they were building this and in the process of building this company when all of this dust settled P was able to break the Clutter and see that there was one big problem glaring right at him in the midst of solving all of this he understood that there was no big brand in the optical space and he observed a subtle shift happening towards the Branded segment an opportunity for a mainstream reliable brand that could be popular across all ages in India I mean just look at how popular their Hustler Series has become it's become a cool style statement and this is kind of where Titan i+ has failed so in 2010 this founding trial left the Ecom bit and went all in on lenscart they knew that the market was big enough that something massive could be built here even without their entire e-commerce and multiple strategies play with this they decided to take on Tata i+ which then was India's largest retail chain in iware already and with the tata's vision to dominate the Indian Optical industry but cut to today almost 14 years later the tables have as you know turned lenscart is doing nearly 3,000 crores of annual revenue and is literally dominating India's organized I segment with 25% market share which is the highest in the market plus it's 5x of the revenue and the market share of the entire Titan iare segment mind you this is the entire Titan iOS segment which includes not just Titan i+ but also other brands like Fast Track and Titan glares so when tata's iare division grew at 33% lenscart grew at 100% year on year and so began P buell's dream to make lenscart the maruti of Indian eyear cool that's enough context now let's get to the main meat of the video and see the four things that lenscart solved that Titan IAS couldn't starting with the first one the accessibility problem see India is called the blind capital of the world because 40% of the world's visually impaired people live in India or the other way to look at it is the entire time that lens card was going after was huge now remember they were competing with Titan i+ and the next door chashma malas so lenscart had to solve for distribution first or accessibility and that's why they were one of the first d2c brands in India to adopt an omni Channel or a fetal model which combined both physical and digital channels they were bullish on stores and understood that Indian consumers need to touch and feel the products they're about to buy but this physical expansion was going to be a very Capital intensive task so to solve for this they initially got a lot of investors on board and overtime so many big investors like ran Tata IFC azim PG Ronnie Scala and even world's largest technology focused investment fund Masa s's Vision fund came on board now of course with this they cracked tier one markets and later moved on to expand into tier 2 cities currently lenscart has more than 2,000 stores spread across 200 plus cities in India while Titan I plus only has about thousand stores in almost the same number of cities and lenscart stores weren't like any other India had ever seen these stores were vibrant filled with tech to try on specs and the staff was super polite who would G it to you really nicely this was the key differentiation and we'll come back more on what this so offline but that was on the offline distribution P the second distribution strategy was to double down on online and mobile presence see lenscart started as a website first so they were building a lot of user insights into how their customers behaved online and remember this was a time when e-commerce was growing in India Indians were becoming more open about buying stuff solely from Amazon Flipkart and all these e-commerce players and in 2017 lenscart became the first player in the industry to launch their own app the way this Sol for user acquisition here is super interesting I mean first they give customers a great virtual trial experience of frames to see how their frame would look on their face this solve for the friction a user would have to go to a shop near them second they give home eye checkups from certified Professionals for only 99 rupees plus think about every time you've gotten an ie checkup done via lens card that opthalmologist is probably the best salesman that these folks have because they have the specs to try on right there and they are right at the point of purchase where the metal is hot because you're feeling slightly scared after getting your ey checkup done and they can sell a new IA to you third they solve for free home trials with multiple frames at the doorstep of consumers where consumers could choose one and finalize it and pay for it right there fourth they delivered the product within a couple of days for free and promis free repair but Fifth and probably the most effective distribution strategy they had in their earlier days days was their viral referral program see this program incentivized customers with a cash reward of 50 to 100 rupees on every contact sync so as users allowed the syncing of their phone contacts the company got a new pool of customers to reach out with marketing campaigns this gave lenscart a massive 200 million customer database in just 6 months and imagine even if they converted 1% of it they get 2 million customers from here easily this is very similar to what we covered on Facebook's acquisition strategy in a previous VI frame now is this ethical today and would it work we leave that for you to decide but the permutation and combination of these initial strategies were completely missing in Titan's Playbook throughout they were just not thinking as big as the folks at lenscart talking about thinking big see thinking big is the core DNA of everything for growthx members to give you an example the founder Circle which is an exclusive community of Founders inside growex made $150 million in Revenue last year that's Revenue not even valuation and rajin for example Our gx5 member and hand of demand generation at kekr built a 10 CR events pipeline after doing the craft of event Le growth and there are so many such examples of growth exp members raising the bar every day growth exp members are a breed apart and if you are someone working product marketing business functions or if you're a Founder growthx might be the right tribee for you we close app applications for this cycle of growthx memberships on 3rd March and of course folks who apply earlier get higher preference during the entire membership process the link to apply for a growthx membership is in the comments now let's talk about the next problem lens card solved the second problem the affordability problem now as I said before push wanted to build the maruti in India's eyar space and in a price sensitive market like India this is only possible when you target not the 1% premium consumer but instead Target the average average Indian consumer so they positioned lenscart as a super affordable product and followed the principle of value based pricing see while the product was affordable he made sure to craft a premium experience once the customer walks into the store or goes onto their app they wanted to create a higher perceived value for the brand so paying for the iare itself felt like a steel deal their taglines like starting from 500 attracted every average Indian consumer and thus soled them very first purchase problem for them they even gave customers their first frame free in the beginning once the customer was in the store lenscart would smartly upsell their customers better lenses like anti- glare anti- blue light and all the other fancy things and mind you the money in this business is not in the frame it's always been in the lenses so simple strategy attract people with the hook of cool looking frames and make money on the lenses plus they didn't just stop at the first purchase they even upsold offers like the gold membership where customers would get 1 plus one free whenever they purchased a new pair I mean if I have to be honest these were tempting and there were many customers who bought the gold membership in excitement but hardly used it or forgot about it later and I'm talking about me by the way the membership though has one core reason make lens card sticky and create loyal customers all of this helped in creating amazing hype among consumers that if you have to a wide variety of style choices with affordable rates and a premium service lens card is the place to be at a place where you won't be charged a premium depending on where the store is located so they brought price standardization and established massive trust and this is the place where Titan I plus missed the bus by the way in fact in an interview s bomic the SE of Titan I plus once said that they stopped giving discounts because they realize that it's not who they are now in hindsight it didn't work for them but moving on to the third problem that lenscart solved awareness many companies create fleeting hype but they aren't able to create fans or a community or a brand per se and it's super rare to see a startup making in-house Brands succeed at this scale Brands like Vincent Chase and John Jacobs are inhouse brands of fenart and they are doing more Revenue than most of the startups today combined and this strategy is well from an investor turned competitor themselves from the famous Playbook of Tas it's simple create separate in-house brands with different values and run them separately think about how Westside and zudio are two different brands with different price points and aspirational value but from the same parent company the tatas remember this is exactly what we spoke about in our zodio wireframe video now to really crack this lenscart invested in the craft of great advertising be it offline or online they sold glasses as fashion and not as a necessity this aspiration of owning more than just one pair of glasses was not something that was ever cracked before by Titan i+ or any other player for that matter even their initial campaigns put out the messaging of owning more than just a pair today lenscart has more than 5,000 Styles and they sell their excessive variety as a USB because see the aim was simple to get recording sales from the same consumer they wanted the same consumer to buy more than one pair and then crack repeatability repeat orders from that customer they also generated massively High W of mouths and they did this also by adopting the latest T by the way in fact they were probably the first ones to get the famous blue cut they knew that if you have to reach out to the masses you would have to go the mainstream star route and not via micro influencers even their latest campaign with Karan joer and bu bunel generated massive traction and while all of this was reaping great benefits for lcard one of the most pivotal points and something that all of you know and we should mention is the obvious Shark Tank See PGE bansel used a national massive distribution to become a household name and people started going to stores to buy the frames that he was wearing on the show he himself became a brand so him sharing an ad screen with Karan jar is not a fluke P bansel himself is a St to date see with this lens card became a much more relatable fun and approachable brand something which was completely missing from Titan I Plus's strategy now coming down to the last and the most tricky problem that lens card solved unit economics see one of the biggest challenges for a business like lenscart is to manage Supply chains and their stores effectively at this scale managing inventory is chaos but lensar did surely well in fact notice this whenever you go to a lens card store next you're literally going to one of the most perfectly executed business examples of AI implementation let me explain see lenscart doesn't only use barcodes for each of their inventory items further to implement AI tracking and they track everything from stock levels in stores inventory and Transit realtime sales data product performance even external factors such as seasonality Regional variables and whatnot so for example if a particular frame is getting sold out really really well the system would make sure that the inventory is Ted for it and if a product is not working out the system would automatically all lot less inventory for it the positioning of the specs even in the store is based on historical data and Regional preferences to hook you in when you enter a store and thus start your buying Journey even in factories lensar decided to install the most advanced Tech Plus there has been news recently that that lenscart is making the largest automated iare manufacturing facility in the world and after the acquisition of the Japanese d2c brand own days lenscart ising Global expansion with 500 of their stores outside India already now if I have to summarize the main difference between the approach of Titan eyear and lenscart has probably been the aggressiveness at the core of their strategies and the big thinking that P bunel brought to the table plus Titan IA where is just 2% of the revenue for the entire Titan group that's small and probably one of the reasons behind their slow paced growth that's it for today I'll see you in the next one