The crew at Spectrum …..
Front row, left to right: Mike Kusmin,
J.J. Skiver and Alex Staryak.
Back row,
left to right: Audrey Duplantier,
Rebecca Brady, Tamara Herron and
Max Amelia Long.
The two St. Louis entrepreneurs founded Spectrum Eyeglass Repair in 1993 to provide the community a service it didn’t have: “quick, durable and affordable eyeglass repairs,” as noted on their website. Kusmin had previous business and managerial experience, and Skiver had worked for LensCrafters in nearly every position in the lab (surfacing and finishing) as well as the retail side (sales, fitting and as a trouble-shooting optician) earlier in his career. “Armed with a torch, a will to serve, and a guitar to fill the downtime, they began providing solders and small repairs out of the tiny basement of a medical office building,” they note on the website.
Word of this unique repair service spread – among both retail customers and optical labs – and Spectrum has now grown to two storefront locations in the St. Louis area with five employees in addition to the founders. “We’re slowly getting a reputation around here,” Skiver said in a recent interview with VMail Weekend. Spectrum now offers a wide variety of repairs, customized clip-ons, magnifiers and eyewear accessories.
Skiver typically oversees the operations aspect of the business, while co-founder Kusmin handles the administrative areas, Skiver explained. “I’m a technician part of the time, as well,” he added. (The staff is so adept at shaping and reshaping old or broken parts that one year they decorated the office Christmas tree using solely parts from old eyeglasses.)
Shortly after starting the business, the two founders realized they needed to carry out some form of outreach to potential wholesale customers rather than relying solely on walk-in retail customers in need of urgent eyeglass repairs. “We used to rely only on retail [customers], but we realized this was getting us only the people around here who broke their glasses. So we started reaching out to wholesale optical labs [including Essilor and Hoya] and we now actually have about 30 accounts across the country, some of them being labs and some of them independent eyeglass stores,” Skiver said.
Skiver said one of the first outside wholesale accounts that Spectrum took on was Erker’s Fine Eyewear of St. Louis, one of the oldest family-owned, high-end optical businesses in the country. “I’ve been in the business since the early ‘90s so I have contacts sprinkled all over the place,” Skiver said. “We started by doing repairs and now we do repairs as well as [produce] clip-ons.”
Frame repair is the main part of their business, but the stores have evolved over the years to address niches that other shops no longer handle. Spectrum also customizes eyewear, handles eyewear modifications, creates crutches for droopy eyelids and works with vintage frames to “spruce them up,” Skiver said.
Skiver said Spectrum’s success rate in frame repair is in the high 90 percent range, due in part to the combined 75 years of experience that the staff has racked up in eyewear. “[Our work] has been evolving over 25 years, and still is, and we are getting better at it,” he said. “We know how long it takes to do certain things, and if [the repair] requires hand machining or an intricately carved small pieces, we will know to charge for that…. We try to over-quote and then come in under budget,” he added.
Skiver said he works closely with most optical stores and has a friendly relationship with the operators. Spectrum does advertise on the radio and Internet, and also is well-known for the creativity in its annual Christmas cards and the Gallery section of its website that features a variety of items crafted from recycled eyeglass parts into unique jewelry and sculptures, some of which they sell at Christmas time.
But word-of-mouth recommendations and returning customers are two key factors in driving the business. “Referrals are a huge part of our business, and we dedicate time to go out and schmooze with all of the optical stores and to make sure they have our business cards,” he explained.
Of course, Skiver also is knowledgeable and well-versed in identifying the most common eyeglass repair requests. He identified the most-common repair jobs brought into Spectrum as: laser welding nearly any point on metal frames, replacing broken spring hinges on metal and plastic frames, installing adjustable nose pad arms to plastic and even horn rim frames.
“When we started this business, I spent most of my time drilling out screws and doing adjustments,” he said, noting that materials today are often not up to the quality level of materials used in the past. “Stuff is not made the way it used to be…. That’s why business is good.”