eyewa offers contact lenses, sunglasses and prescription glasses
Founded in August 2017 by Anass Boumediene and Mehdi Oudghiri, home-grown eyewear e-commerce platform, eyewa has seen considerable growth. From a team of 2, the team size is 30 now. Combining a seed round in January 2018 and the recent Series A round of $7.5 million, eyewa has raised total funding to $8.6 million. Currently, eyewa offers contact lenses, sunglasses and prescription glasses. “We received our first order on August 2, 2017,” recollects Oudghiri. “We have a sizeable youth population – our core audience, aged between 20 and 35, majority being female – that is connected and active on social media. The region boasts one of the highest smartphone penetrations in the world. People are willing to buy online, but the offering is still scarce, except for the large e-commerce platforms. We saw this as an opportunity to set up eyewa, a niche vertical, specialising in a category. We offer a lot of products that are not available on the generalist e-commerce platforms. We looked for specific brands of contact lenses that were not available in the region and brought them onboard. Today, we guarantee 100% availability of contact lenses on eyewa – our biggest category and what is usually seen as a pain point in the offline space.”
Not only does eyewa offer a wide range of contact lenses, but 90% of the delivery within the UAE also happens on the same day. In the worst case, it takes up to three days. In Saudi Arabia, the delivery timeline is two to four days.
“We still have low penetration in eyewear and sunglasses categories,” Boumediene admits. “But we are growing at an exponential rate. We are registering double-digit growth. Our average cart size has also grown.”
Brand availability on eyewa varies between the UAE and Saudi Arabia. “Currently, our inventory – including 2,000-2,500 SKUs in sunglasses and prescription glasses and the largest in the region in contact lenses – is already larger than a single physical eyewear store. However, the goal is to create a combined inventory of all the optical stores in the region,” Oudghiri states.
