Luxottica Group SpA

And I've heard, I mean, this was years ago, just a random thing that I remember hearing that there's only like one person makes almost all the frames, you know, or there's only a couple of players that actually manufacture it.

Well, yeah, there's a company called Luxottica.

Okay.

Which, I don't know the current stat, but yeah, they're the biggest in the mix.

With the metaverse vision that's now been officially communicated to investors, to the public, to its users, we should expect that Facebook is only going to ramp up the evangelism around virtual reality even more in the coming years.

Facebook has also recently partnered with Luxottica to launch smart glasses as another way to achieve faster adoption.

Virtual reality is the foundational hardware piece that Facebook is trying to win.

It wants to get its VR headsets in the hands of as many people as possible.

Spent a few more years in the fashion world.

But the bulk of my operator side experience was at SLR Luxottica, which is probably the largest multinational corporation that nobody's ever heard of.

But you know the brands that they own.

Ray-Ban, Oakley, Vogue, Oliver Peoples, LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut, Target Optical.

We regained the rights to the business in Europe.

And so when I left the business, we were just shy of a billion in somewhere around 700 locations.

Spent a little bit of time after Luxottica writing my book, Moving Your Brand Out of the Friend Zone, which is in its second printing, and really allows me to do something that I love to do, which is to teach, to mentor, to help people avoid the mistakes that I made, but also maybe give them a little bit of something to climb up the mountain a little bit faster.

And then most recently, I was the first in-seat CMO at Driven Brands for their largest business unit, Take 5 All Change, a $1,400, $1.4 billion location.

Almost no other industry works like this.

I guess it's common in the glasses industry where Luxottica basically owns all of these smaller brands that pose as independent entities like Ray-Ban, Oakley, and so on.

And it's common with funeral homes also, believe it or not.

But for the most part, this is not how it works.

So we talk about what that means.

We also discussed Isilor Luxottica, which is a frames and lens company, one of the biggest in the world.

And you probably actually have been to one of their stores, Sunglass Heart, OPSM, or own some of their frames.

They make frames for some of the top luxury names in the world, as well as they own Raybrand and Oakley.