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Sunday Times Top 100 Disruptor Joins Scotlens

The partnership aims to offer Eye Care Professionals a unique highly personalised ‘in chair’ and ‘on call’ clinical support.

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(PRESS RELEASE) LINLITHGOW, SCOTLAND — Tom Griffiths, a recent Sunday Times Top 100 Entrepreneur-Disruptor, has formally joined Scotlens | Custom Fit Contact Lenses as a partner, taking an operational Managing Director role. Griffiths’ interest in the independent Scottish manufacturer was sparked when his teen son’s life was transformed by a Scotlens Nocturnal Ortho-K lens. Spotting the global growth in Ortho-K and a UK market struggling to introduce the concept, Griffiths, a brand, marketing and innovation specialist with global brand achievements and viral marketing successes to his name, along with his own Ortho-K story to tell, approached Scotlens. With owner Scott Brown, an Optometrist who designs the lenses running the Clinical side, and Tom Griffiths running the Commercial side, the partnership aims to offer Eye Care Professionals a unique highly personalised ‘in chair’ and ‘on call’ clinical support in addition to high impact sales, marketing and business growth support. Clinical & Commercial.

Scott Brown, Partner & Clinical director of Scotlens, says:
“When Tom walked through the door, we hit it off immediately. As he demonstrated where he thought the Ortho-K market was failing and his solution for fixing that … using our tea cups, packets of sugar and scribbles on a notepad, as only Tom can, I realised that our company, and indeed the industry, needed fresh blood and disruptors from outside to come in and shake it up. Tom’s track record speaks for itself, launching gapyear.com onto one of the world’s first social network platforms way back in 1998 before Google was running, inventing a bank account, a travel insurance product, a man with a 1 million+ social impression viral campaign to his name, two decades of media experience as a global Gap Year media spokesperson and a recent string of disruptive collaboration projects. Sir Richard Branson once said of Tom that “His energy and enthusiasm is infectious”. Well, it is! His disruptive nature always searching for the untried, his experience and his relentless passion will enable Scotlens to enter new markets and our ECP partner network to grow in a sustainable way post Covid”.

Tom Griffiths, Partner & managing director of Scotlens, says:
“My son’s life went down the pan when he went into big school, not helped by his progressive high myopia which meant thicker lenses, him giving up sports which he loved and not being able to see every time his glasses fell off. It broke my heart. We accidentally found Ortho-K lenses and they transformed his life. He is now a confident, happy, active teen with stabilised myopia. Now that he can see the waves, he has become an excellent surfer, which is his passion. I was amazed how unknown Ortho-K lenses were. It’s remarkably like the 1990’s Gap Year story with a complicated narrative, ‘off trend’ messaging and completely misunderstood. The sector has a job to do to change the narrative to create a spark, and I look forward to being part of that. I’m delighted to join Scotlens, a second-generation family business with extremely high-quality products designed by innovative Optometrists seeking to achieve the best results, first with Jack, Scott’s father, in the 1970’s and now with Scott. Scott is a specialist GP lens geek and I’m an innovation geek, so we’re well matched. Ortho-K make up only around 1% of the global contact lens market, yet it’s a very effective and ‘on trend’ product, so it’s a valuable sector that will certainly explode over the next decade. Certainly a space we will be operating in. Our Nocturnal Ortho-K lens, we believe, is a world class product, as are our stable of specialist GP lenses which we feel are suited particularly well for the current growth in the Middle East, Asian and Chinese markets as the world wakes up to the Global Myopia Pandemic, predicted to be at 50% (5 billion) by 2050. As for the UK, we have the perfect storm of UK child Myopia growth due to Covid lockdown coinciding with several fantastic, and no doubt well marketed, Myopia Control devices coming onto the market in both the glasses and contact lens space. Lots of positive discussion and focus on Myopia Control, which is much needed in the UK. It’s going to be a busy and exciting 2021.”

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