Every successful business keeps an eye out for opportunities to create new paths toward success. In the most recent episode of Best Practices, host Steve Alexander sat down with Greg Naes, founder of BluTech, to explore how performance and wellness products are a key growth market for today’s consumer, especially those that can improve sleep, boost productivity, and improve quality of life. All of this applies to your eye care practice, read on to learn how.

Check Out the Episode Here:

The Sleep Connection

A critical and non-negotiable aspect of wellness is sleep. Modern lives, especially those dominated by screens and artificial light, are riddled with disruptions to natural rhythms. While many patients turn to supplements such as melatonin as a quick fix, eyewear that manages blue light exposure offers a safer, longer-term solution that’s less invasive to your long-term sleep health. Eye care providers who take ownership of this space can position themselves as leaders in holistic health.

From Features to Solutions

Instead of framing eyewear around features, shifting to a solutions oriented approach allows your team to identify problems and prescribe solutions that immediately enhance your patient’s quality of life. Technological advancements in recent years have allowed us to position glasses as tools to address concerns like poor sleep, fatigue, or reduced focus.

Doing so builds trust in your practice and expertise and gives patients the security they need to properly invest in their visual wellness. Give your patients peace of mind while delivering value that reaches beyond what your competitor eye care businesses can offer.

Integrating Wellness Into Practice to Expand the Horizon

There are a few practical steps that practices should consider when looking to move into the wellness space. A simple place to start is by updating intake forms to include more wellness-based questions that are key to providing accurate solutions for your patients. To start, consider adding questions around the following topics:

1.Sleep habits

2.Supplement use

3 Lifestyle

4.Overall health goals

By connecting eyewear to practical benefits beyond sharper vision, providers can expand care for both prescription and non-prescription wearers alike.

As Steve points out, “glasses do more than correct refractive error, they can meaningfully impact health and performance”. By educating patients on these broader benefits, practices set themselves apart while delivering care that delights patients and changes their relationship with eyewear and your business.

The Path Forward

It’s clear that wellness products in general are expanding rapidly, forward thinking business owners understand that and work to create new opportunities for their practices. With that in mind, consider the following core points:

1. Identify problems and build toward patient specific solutions

2. Discuss patient benefits, not features

3. Wellness and performance are high growth markets

Understanding where your customers are and what they want is vital to every business, but often what separates success and growth from stagnation is the ability to pivot to what your customers will want before they can even articulate it themselves. We know customers are investing heavily in wearables and genetic testing and other performance enhancing tools, we also know that great eyewear is a key component to wearer comfort and clarity in their everyday lives.

Combining the desire for wellness with eyewear products that address multiple needs is a clear path to building a more sustainable future for your business, one that provides solutions for your customers and lets them find you because you’re you and not because you’re on some vague list of doctors that patients might check every few years.