All the potential of China

Sherin Chen, National Chief Marketing Officer at Baodao, the biggest optical company in China’s retail sector, describes an interesting cross section of the domestic market exclusively for WMIDO. Could you tell us the story of your shops?Baodao was founded 30 years ago. We have been in mainland China for 18 years. Now we have nearly 1,200 stores, all of them are Direct-sales stores. Online stores have also been set up on several major e-commerce platforms. We are now China’s largest optical retail company. In 2013, we transferred from a retail company to an optometric integrated Nova Vision. What are Chinese consumers like?Its consumers can be divided into “optical glasses” and “sunglasses”. First, as for optical glasses, there’s a population of 1.5 billion consumers in China, 70% of them have myopia, and more than 80% of them need vision correction (astigmatism and presbyopia). According to unofficial statistics, the market of optical glasses is worth 60 billion, but I think it’s far more than that. The rigid demand is at least five times as it is now. The age of consumers is range from 10 to 60. Second, as for sunglasses, it will be apparently divided into online and offline consumers. You can pick up on the internet and have them send straight to your home and the price is 20-50% cheaper. You don’t need to try on them since they can be sent back in 7 days if you’re not satisfied. So consumers no longer enter offline stores to select glasses. The other kind of consumer will shop offline, for there’re more functional glasses, one stresses on polarized lenses, one stresses they suit for different outdoor sports.Is the consumer aware of the Crèateurs brands?They always have market.How is the market in your country?It is a huge market. For example, if you walk on the street, you see one wearing sunglasses of 500 passengers. So the market is very potential. There isn’t a complete statistic about how often Chinese change their optical frames. Our system shows, it takes about 3 to 5 years.What are your future plans?We are moving towards the era of Internet 3.0, trying to figure out how to use new technology to make more users recognize us, receive optometry in our stores, and finally become our members. In terms of the stores, the optometrist training is more important, since China has no optometrist law.But we believe in the near future there will be relevant laws. It will help consumers select "quality optometry of stores," because the optometry service provided by hospitals is far from enough.