Carlos Valdez
Pedro Pintos
Rodrigo de la Garza
Tecnológico de Monterrey
Consuelo Garcia-de-la-torre
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Contrary to the majority of businesses that offer visual care and sell contact lenses and glasses through typical retail spaces, LECO is innovating how it delivers its products and services to its final customers by getting rid of any physical commercial space. Rather than waiting for the client to schedule an appointment to see an optometrist or go to a shopping mall to buy contact lenses or glasses, LECO’s approach is to take these directly to the clients’ door, be it their house, school or company, facilitating access to visual health for anybody.
LECO’s business is composed of two main branches: their on site visual check ups and their online store, offering contact lenses, glasses or replacement lenses to be delivered to your door. Any customer can make use of either, or both, by accessing their webpage (www.leco.mx) and using their online check up schedule system or their online store.
This means that instead of visiting a professional optometrist at their office and then going to a pharmacy to buy the required product separately, LECO’s customers can schedule a visit from an optometrist to their home, school or office, and then order the required product online, all from the same webpage. Everything is paid online.
For a regular customer this saves time and money, for someone who’s disabled or otherwise restricted in their movements, this means having access to visual health.
On top of that, LECO offers other facilities. Groups of ten or more people can get a visit from one of their optometrist and a diagnose for free, which makes it, for example, a great benefit for a company or school to offer to their employees or students and staff.
Currently LECO only offers their check up visits in Mexico City and Guadalajara, but can deliver their products to any part of Mexico. They plan to expand their check up service to other major cities in Mexico, and other countries in the future.
Inspiration to found LECO came from the experience its CEO had when he wanted to change the lenses of his glasses and found out that the visual health industry in Mexico the potential to improve. Instead of finding it easy and accessible, he was confronted by a lot of obstacles, the biggest of which was the poor customer service of optics, pharmacies and retailers. they operated more like one would expect from big retailers and lacked the personal attention healthcare providers should offer.
With this in mind he set a goal of improving the customer experience within the industry, making visual health easier to diagnose and treat.
The innovative way in which LECO operates and delivers its products and services to its customers is making visual health not only easier to reach in Mexico, but also cheaper. By sticking to a digital market presence, LECO reduces costs significantly both for the products it sells and for the services it provides.
For any given individual customer, a single visit and diagnosis from a LECO optometrist costs 300 MXN or 15 USD, which is much cheaper than driving to an optometrist’s office and paying for an eye examination. For a group of ten or more it is free.
The same is true for the products it offers: first, LECO became able to sell its products at a lower rate than any other regular retailers by eliminating the need for retail space. Then it created its own line of glasses, which reduced costs even further by manufacturing locally.
LECO gives its customers to access a professional examination. Additionally, the reduction in price turns their business model into something that could be replicated not only across different countries, but also different industries, paving the way for more health care providers to follow this path or adapt it to their own challenges.
Aside from reducing production and selling costs (which don’t necessarily mean they’re increasing their profit margins), a digital only presence represents a great opportunity for easy expansion. Without offering on site check ups across the country, they’ve been able to sell contacts and sunglasses to customers in any part of Mexico.
But most importantly, through a proactive model, in which they’re the ones to take visual health care to customers and not the other way around, they’ve been able to grow faster and acquire more customers than if they had a fixed location, while at the same time improving the experience that every customer gets when they choose LECO over any other optic.
This is most noticeable when providing their service to any company or school, where they can not only help people that are already aware of their visual situation but also help others identify the symptoms of their own undiagnosed problems or prevent them from developing.
LECO’s purpose starts by helping people realize if they need visual aid. The most common issue that people with visual problems face is that they don’t realize they have a problem until it’s too big to notice. Not getting visual care on time is bad for many reasons: it can lead to other health problems like headaches, loss of balance or lack of concentration, or it could cause serious accidents. Besides, the longer people take to attend a visual problem, the faster it evolves and the harder it is to correct.
LECO is a people oriented company, that through an innovative business model has managed to offer great quality products with a detailed and personal customer service. All of it with the fixed idea of improving the state of visual health for society.
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LECO is a business startup targeting the visual health industry through an innovative business model. It offers on site visual exams on demand, with a focus on providing this service to companies for free. Additionally, it offers follow up visual care by offering online sale of contact lenses and its own line of glasses.