Jamie Murray Wells Spills The Beans

Jamie Murray Wells launched Glasses Direct in 2004 on the last £1000 of his student loan and has since caused a stir in the optical and business worlds. The company's wacky marketing campaigns and their competitors "dirty tricks" have made headlines and just four years since he was running the operation alone from his parents house in Wiltshire, Jamie is looking forward to turning the start-up into a global brand.

As a student Jamie knew he wanted to start his own business when he caught "the entrepreneurial bug" at university. After following the success of dotcom's like Amazon, he knew that the internet was the area he wanted to be in.

He says, "I watched Netscape float; I'd been there when Amazon went up and down. I'd watched it as a university student and couldn't do anything about it so when I finally had the time and the inclination I decided to figure out the web and become an entrepreneur."

Jamie, who got the idea to start Glasses Direct when he was faced with a £150 price tag on the high street, admits that doing something about a good idea is the most difficult part of starting in business.

"Once your mind enters the zone of an entrepreneur and you've stayed up all night working out how a product is going to be designed or how the website is going to look, then you are on a roll, to go from seeing an opportunity to actually doing something about it is the biggest hurdle. That is the difference between an entrepreneur and someone who is not, we see ideas all the time but we also say ‘someone else will do it'. I thought, get up off of the sofa, put down the Play Station 2 and do something about it, that is the biggest challenge."

Jamie's determination to create a successful brand was matched with great resilience to pursue a vision to sell glasses at a fair price, despite some low blows from those opposed to his pioneering idea.

"In the early days there were some real lows. I realised that it's not only Virgin and BA that have the dirty tricks; start-up businesses have the same problems. In the first few weeks we had legal threats, our suppliers stopped doing business with us because they were so scared that our competitors would stop using them. Our site was down for three weeks; I was sitting at home with friends trying to start a business up under all of this commercial and regulatory pressure thinking, s**t, is this really going to work?"

When Jamie, now 25, was on the brink of giving up, he was encouraged to go ahead with his ground breaking plans when he realised the lengths his competitors would go to for sabotage.

"I thought, I'm doing something really disruptive here, if people are kicking and screaming you know you are doing something right. If you do something revolutionary then you have to expect people to be upset by it, and that's not a bad thing."

Since those first early setbacks, the business has gone from strength to strength and last year secured £6m of investment from venture capitalists. Backers of the company expect that Glasses Direct will achieve similar success to world class businesses like Skype and Betfair.

Jamie says, "When you have people injecting money who want to create a billion pound business by your side that gives you a real kick, that's a great high for me."

The people behind the glasses

With offices in central London and Swindon, the company has come a long way since its humble beginnings at Jamie's parents' house. With over 40 staff members in each location, the team is growing fast and Jamie is specific about the kind of people that he wants to work with.

"We're looking for people who are really smart; when we are recruiting I will tell people to recruit people who are smarter than them. We don't have criteria, some of our staff have been to Harvard; some of them literally knocked on the door when starting up at home and said, "Can I have a job?" They went picking and packing and now they're head of a department. In terms of that we're flexible, what we want is an interest in building a high growth company, taking some risks along the way changing a world a bit."

Jamie, who describes himself as spontaneous, unstoppable and determined, showed how important it is to find the right people when he tracked down one of the UK's top marketers David Magliano to sit on the non-exec board.

"I tracked (David) down to Claridges, where he was speaking about how he won the Olympic 2012 bid. I really needed marketing input and while he was speaking I was reading the programme which said that he'd started up the airline Go which sold to Easy Jet where he became Marketing Director. I thought, what a lot of parallels; Easy Jet have taken something very expensive and made it available to the mass market.

"I just went up to him, gave him my business card and said, ‘you've got to get involved'. This is the best marketer in Britain; he has just won an MBE for it. If you're an entrepreneur who is doing good things, everyone wants to be involved."

Glasses Direct has opened an office in Utah and has around eight people based there. Jamie insists that the choice of location is not for the great skiing but because of the location and recruitment issues.

"It's fed ex hub, also we needed to hire people in Salt Lake City so rather then move them to the business, we moved the business to them."

Jamie is great at getting his point across; he is very direct and expects the same of his staff.

"We're looking for straight talking people. Warning signs in an interview are when people start using corporate mumbo jumbo. When we talk to our customers we tell it like it is, we are transparent. I'm looking for someone who can look me in the eye and tell me if they disagree with something. If they want to say something controversial they are going to say it, if there is a problem, they don't hide it. When we are speaking to the customer we're honest about prices, we are their champion."

Providing an online price and a personal service

It is critical that Glasses Direct gives great customer service. Jamie believes it is so important to stay in tune with the consumer that he gets enquiries routed to his mobile phone each day. By utilising technology, glasses direct have developed the site so that users can virtually try on glasses in 3D and Jaime believes that their service has surpassed that of the high street stores.

"When we started the business we were always trying to get up to the level of service that the high street had. Now, people often say to us that they've spent three to four hours trying on the glasses on the website.  If they went into the high street and tried on six or seven pairs they'd have a consultant hovering over them saying, ‘You've tried on seven pairs don't you think you should buy some now'. So the experience is actually better; we know that we're exceeding the service on the high street. "

Jamie receives hundreds of emails from pensioners and students that are thrilled that they can now afford glasses offered by Glasses Direct. Jamie seems to get a buzz from this and often hand delivers orders if he has a business meeting in the same vicinity as a customer waiting for an order.

"I hand delivered a pair down to Folkestone the other day. I knocked (on the customer's) door and said ‘I'm here to deliver your glasses.' She was so happy and said the quality was fantastic. Online you get a wealth of information, some of our pairs have hundreds of reviews from customers; that's a personal touch like you wouldn't believe."

Jamie's approach to customer service is similar to that of one of his business idols, Jeff Bezos.
"He would make sure that every penny is spent on things that the customers see. That love of the customer that makes you able to put yourself in their shoes makes you good at business."

Jamie, who won the Shell Livewire Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2005, also admires "the smarts" of Bill Gates and the "modesty" of Warren Buffet but Jamie has become eminent in his own right.

Jamie's success has highlighted how slow the high street was to appreciate the value of the internet and because of that, he has had a four year head start as market leader.

"A whole industry was in denial, like ostriches in the sand. Banking, travel and groceries had all moved onto the web, telephoning was flipping over with Skype and (opticians) thought that their industry was exempt. The internet is the most powerful thing that has happened in the last century since the invention of electricity and the high street retailers, like Specsavers, just didn't think it could touch their business. Now we have some of biggest chains in the world knocking on our doors saying ‘can you help us understand what the web can do for us?' It's like.....touché."

More disruption ahead

With the beta site up and running in the US, Jamie is confident that Glasses Direct will become a global household brand within the next two years, but he won't stop there.

"I've slightly tipped the way that the industry worked and I'll do that to more industries in the future. I'll take industries that are a bit stuffy and boring and I'll throw a hand grenade into them as well. That's what excites me, being able to change the world in my own small way."

Jamie has been surprised to find out how many other people were in a similar position to him when starting out.

"When you are starting a business you feel lonely and feel like you are doing it on your own but actually, there is such a strong network of like-minded dot-com entrepreneurs who are all setting out to change the world and setting out to do great things in respective industries."

Jamie Murray Wells' achievements have been widely recognised and he is now an ambassador for Enterprise and a member of the Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne's, New Enterprise Council.

"I'm very interested in helping out politically where I can. I go to schools and universities and try to engender the entrepreneurial bug that I caught at university. I like to think that I am one of the youngest angel investors in the country because I have already invested in mybuilder.com and I am looking at another couple of investments."

Despite his youthful apperarence, Jamie comes across as determined, level-headed and very professional. His manners are very good and he seems to have embraced his social responsibility whilst remaining savvy business man.

"I'm here to build businesses and I'm not afraid to say that I'm in it to make an absolute killing for me and my shareholders!"

And we are sure that he will! For more information visit Glassesdirect.co.uk.