Lenskart's plan to be "Maruti Suzuki" of eyewear 👓
Core actionable for competitive markets.
Welcome to the 152nd edition of the GrowthX Newsletter. Every Tuesday & Thursday I write a piece on startups & business growth. Today’s piece is going to 95,300+ operators & leaders from startups like Google, Stripe, Swiggy, Razorpay, CRED & more
Lenskart posted ₹ 1,502 Cr revenue in FY 2022 💰
It owns ~4% of ₹ 40,000 Cr eye wear market 😳
How it plans to be "Maruti Suzuki" of eyewear ⬇️
The backstory - 2010 🗓️
India's eye wear market had millions of small & medium stores. Jio did not exist, internet was expensive - buying something online was alien, buying eyewear online seemed impossible.
Lenskart's entry to market ⚡️
Contact lenses was the go to market product - for the obvious reasons. The product category was new for Indian audience & was considered luxury. It nailed the first product & entered the brutal prescription eyewear market.
Fast forward 2023 ✨
The eyewear market has grown from ₹20,000 Cr in early 2010 to double in the next 10 years - Lenskart wants to ride the market.
How Lenskart is learning from "Maruti Suzuki" ⬇️
First/ Maruti 800's competitive edge 🚙
Cars produced at the time had maintenance problems. The first Maruti model solved this elegantly. Lenskart's contact lenses were an edge over anything in the market at the time.
Second/ pricing as core lever 💵
Maruti solved mass market pricing for a "car". It launched a car at Rs.45000 at the time when owning a car was aspirational for most Indian households. Lenskart did it with 1+1 eyewear and effectively selling eyewear like hot cakes.
Third/ constant incremental changes 🧩
Back when Maruti launched it's first car, it came back with a aerodynamic version in under 2 years - that's crazy turnaround. Lenskart does it with sub-brand launches - Vincent Chase, Lenskart Air & John Jacobs.
Fourth/ end to end problem solving 💙
Maruti solved supply chain for the car industry in India - it was core for it to scale. Lenskart does this with supply chain improvements across design, manufacturing, logistics & retail.
Fifth/ branding in commodity market ⭐️
Once automobile as a category evolved, Maruti kept investing in building a brand and going low on feature selling. Lenskart has given the mass market an "aspirational eyewear brand"
Sixth/ riding the positioning wave 🌊
With first Maruti being handed over by Late Indira Gandhi to an Air India employee, Maruti understood important of positioning. No wonder Lenskart used a single Shark tank season to sell thousands of "Hustlr" series glasses.
Brand is the core lever for competitive categories ♥️
Especially with Eyewear where the product differentiation just on quality is almost negligible. Brand play inside product is something we almost always ignore saying - that's marketing teams job - you are dead wrong.
Question for your product teams - What core levers are they impacting for brand this quarter? Time to ask some important questions.
In the latest edition of GrowthX Fam-wins, we sat with Abhik, Co-Founder, WintWealth & GrowthX members since early 2022. He revealed the deepest insights into building for trust in a trust-deficit fintech ecosystem, early wins and big failures of his life. Don’t miss this one, curious souls.
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