Aim to serve a billion people: Bansal

With eyewear company Lenskart all set for its maiden initial public offering (IPO), cofounder, chief executive officer (CEO) and managing director (MD) Peyush Bansal talks about plans and challenges of the business in a video interview with Surajeet Das Gupta.

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Edited excerpts:

One of the reasons for the IPO was raising funds for your expansion. How do you plan to build the relatively unorganised eyewear segment in India?

• There are 500 million Indians who require glasses. But we have 60 eyewear stores for one million people, which is the lowest in any category though we have 1,200 jewellery stores for a million We have only 30 optometrists for a million people. So, we have not even scratched the surface of the myopia problem. What we need is at least 70,000 to 80,000 stores. And, we will have to lead — currently we have over 2,000 stores, which is not even a drop in the ocean compared to where we need to be.

How are you addressing the problem?

• We have to create an ecosystem of distribution. We did 16 million eye tests last year but we have to go up to 100 million. We are currently in 400 cities but want to expand to another 600 cities in the mid-and-long term. What the industry has lacked is technology. What we are trying to do is not put on an opticians hat but a technology hat or the Amazon hat and unlock the challenges of distribution. We have developed a centralised distribution system — instead of a local supply chain — so if someone wants glasses in Dimapur — I can make the glasses centrally and give it to him or her. We are resolving the shortage of optometrists by remote technology — so someone sitting in Kolkata can leverage the internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) to do eye testing for someone in Dimapur or Jodhpur. The eventual aim is to serve a billion people.