Daybreak - Lenskart gave India affordable vision. Now the fine print’s finally coming into focus

Episode Date: November 2, 2025

Lenskart changed how India buys glasses. It made eyewear affordable, stylish, and available on every street corner. But behind that success is a story of shortcuts. Cheap acetate frames, thinner coatings, and rushed prescriptions have left many customers questioning the quality they once trusted. As the company prepares to close a massive IPO, its promise of clarity is facing some uncomfortable scrutiny.In this episode we look at how Lenskart built its empire on affordability and what that means for the people who actually wear its glasses.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production.

Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording. Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get an alert as soon as we release our first episode, please follow Intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. If you live in India, there is a good chance that a pair of lens card glasses sits somewhere in your home. Maybe it's on your desk, maybe it is in your bag,

or maybe it is pushed on your nose right now. because in just over a decade, Lenskart has done something remarkable. It has made prescription glasses cool, from a medical need that is like an awkward accessory to a fashion choice. Think bright storefronts in every city and that familiar one-plus-one deal. And spectacle brands with names like Vincent Chase, John Jacobs, now almost as recognizable as Zara or H&M. All of this strategy has clearly worked.

Today, the company is worth more than $6 billion. And it is gearing up for one of India's biggest IPOs this November, hoping to raise up to $8,000 crore rupees or $900 million. But the question is, what exactly did it take to get here? Because behind that slick, tech-driven brand image lies a manufacturing story that is far more complicated. It is one that involves cheap materials, confusing product lines,

and frustrated customers who just wanted a pair of glasses that fit and lost. As Lenskart prepares to go public soon, there is a growing question in the minds of its most loyal customers. Has the company's obsession with affordability come at the cost of quality? Welcome to Daybreak,

a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nick Da Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Vargis and I will come to you with one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Lenskart's one-plus-one deal

is not just a marketing trick. It is one of the cornerstones of its business model itself. It was launched in 2018 and now has nearly 7 million gold members. Now, I don't know if you're aware of this, but if you've actually been to one of their physical stores,

everything you see there from the frames to the lenses is made in-house. And those names that you see on your lenses, like British Optics, Stokai, they sound quite premium, right? Except they're not. British optics is Lenskart's own creation, entirely owned and controlled by the company. It has no research labs, no patents, no independent technology. Nothing close to what global leader SLR, for example, boasts with its 7,000 patents. Tokai, on the other hand, is a real Japanese brand, 85 years old, known for its ultra-thin lenses. Lenskart has a strategic contract with them.

But as one Bangalore-based optometrist told my colleague Pranati that their lenses are quite subpar compared to SELORs. Lenskarts moved away from British optics altogether, sourcing from its own brand called Own Days and the German company Rodenstock. Why? Because lower costs. And that is where the true advantage lies. Each of its factories in Singapore, Dubai and China is built on an investment of roughly 800 crore rupees. Centralised production, computerised lens carving, all done at scale. The finished glasses are assembled in Rajasthan, Gurkau and now a mega plant in Hyderabad. These factories feed over 2,700 stores worldwide. Nearly 40% of Lenskarts revenue now comes from its international stores thanks to higher prices abroad.

Even the frames are made in-house, mostly from acetate, which is a cheap bioplastic. One eyewear manufacturer says that Lenskart buys acetate. sheets for about 300 to 400 to 400 rupees a kilo. From each sheet they make around 20 frames. That is about 15 rupees per frame. By contrast, hyperalergenic

TR90 frames which are gentle on the skin cost 25 to 80 rupees to make and the titanium or metal frames are 100 or more. And the cost difference is what is Lenskart's magic.

While traditional opticians earn around 20 to 30% margins, Lenskart enjoys up to 60%. It owns the entire chain, no middleman, no distributors. And the result, in 2025, its revenue jumped to more than 6,000 crore rupees with a profit of nearly 300 crores. And the customers keep returning back, like Manjira from Pune. She told again that she would prefer Titan any day. But Lenskart is everywhere.

There is a store every 2 to 3 kilometers and they come home for testing and delivery. So it is fast and it is cheap. Now, of course, this sort of convenience is hard to resist. But next time when you see those shiny Vincent Chase or John Jacobs frames which are priced at $2,000, just remember they were likely made for less than $200. More on this in the next segment. As you may have guessed, anything low-cost rarely comes without a catch. Take Lenskart's contact lenses brand, Aquilense, for example.

It sells monthly disposable lenses for $300 a pair, half the price of Bosh and Lom's 600-ru pairs. How? Lenskart uses the factories of Cooper Vision in the UK, which is a global lens maker. But the material it chooses is cheaper, hydrogill, instead of silicon hydrogill. Silicon hydrogill lenses allow more oxygen through, keeping the eyes comfortable. Hydrogels, on the other hand, are softer, but when your eyes dry, even slightly, they become brittle and tear.

And they have. Users on Reddit have reported lenses ripping while still in the eye. One Apollo hospital's ophthalmologists told us that something like this can cause real corneal damage. Also, they say that cheap lenses scratch faster, and that affects vision, increases power and even causes headaches. It is not just materials, even the people behind the lenses matter as well. Unlike Titan I-plus or Vision Express, which hire optometrists with full degrees, Lenskart often hires diploma holders, those trained in two years vision technician courses. And here's the twist.

Lenskart runs those courses itself through Lenskart Academy and universities like Dattah Megai Institute in Maharashtra. So, while other companies pay $3 to $5,000 a year for certified optometrists, Lenskart pays 2 to 3 lakhs only. It is legal, of course, but when it comes to accuracy, it's not always perfect. Shweta from Hyderabad learned it the hard way. She spent $10,000 rupees on progressive lenses for her mother under the same one-plus-one deal. Within weeks, her mother complained of unclear vision and eye strain. Turns out, Lenskart had marked her pupil distance incorrectly.

On Reddit, there are over 500 similar complaints about incorrect prescriptions and rushed eye tests. In a sample of 20 Lenskart customers interviewed by the Ken, six of them had wrong prescriptions. and five did not get tested by Lenskart at all. And yet, when the company filed its IPO papers, there was no mention of customer complaints, only franchisee grievances. So maybe the question isn't whether these issues exist, but whether they are baked into the model itself.

But even with all of this, nobody is really stopping Lenskart. In fact, competitors are following its lead. Titan, specs makers, they've all launched their own buy-one get-one free offers, because that is what the market demands now. But as one veteran optometrist in Bangalore put it, behind the colours and the shapes,

it's still about vision, about accuracy and about care. He remembers when local opticians had their own grinding units. One pair of lenses would cost 150 rupees, and they made them by hand. Now, his store sees, these 15 customers a month, which is down from 30 a day. Because in a world where cheap trumps quality, the old way just cannot compete.

But at what cost? That is the question that Lenskart's customers and investors will soon have to answer. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Snitha Sharma and edited by Rajiv CN.