Find the supplier
of a frame brand.

Knowing who distributes a frame brand is an unremarkable piece of information, right up to the day you need it. It is written down nowhere central, and it changes without notice.

Why supplier information goes missing

An eyewear brand almost never belongs to its distributor. It gets licensed, sold on, picked up by another group, or distributed in parallel by several companies depending on the territory. None of that reaches the store other than through a sales rep passing by.

So on the day a reference has to be reordered, a collection restocked or a spare part claimed, the optician traces it back by hand: an old catalogue at the back of a drawer, a misplaced business card, an unreachable rep's email, a call to a colleague. That is time spent on information which, once found, will be no better kept the next time round.

A search that works both ways

The directory is more than an alphabetical list of suppliers. It records the link between a brand and a supplier as a first-class piece of data, which means you can start from whichever end you happen to have:

• From the brand. You have the frame in hand and the name printed on the temple. The directory returns the supplier or suppliers carrying it.
• From the supplier. You have a company name and want to know what it carries before a meeting. The directory returns all of its brands.

That second direction is not a bonus feature: it is what lets you prepare a rep visit, judge whether a supplier covers enough references to justify opening an account, or track down a brand whose name you forgot but whose origin you didn't.

What the directory covers today

• Over 950 frame brands on file.
• Close to 300 distinct suppliers.
• Over 1,000 links between a brand and a supplier.
• Around 75 brands carried by more than one supplier, precisely the cases where a single-name list would mislead.

Each supplier has a record able to carry its website, address, phone numbers and email addresses. Those details are shown where they have been filled in; the brand-to-supplier link itself is present across the whole directory.

How the directory is kept current

The directory updates two complementary ways. Bulk updates come through a file import, which compares the submitted content against the existing directory and only writes the differences. One-off corrections are made by hand, record by record.

Both sources are tracked separately on every record, which guarantees a later import cannot overwrite a manually entered correction. Information verified in store and reported back is therefore not lost at the next catalogue drop.

Frequently asked questions