Cambridge Spectacle Co.: a direct-to-consumer eyewear brand at $100K a month

Cambridge Spectacle Co. sells spectacles and sunglasses directly to consumers and through ASDA Opticians, and was doing $100K a month in revenue as reported by founder Ahmed Ejaz in a May 2023 interview.

How it started

Ejaz qualified as an optometrist and worked around the UK doing eye exams. Between patients he would come out and look at the high-priced designer frames on the shelves, trying to work out why they cost so much. Warby Parker was taking off in the United States at the time, producing good product at fairer prices, and he concluded there was room for a UK startup to do the same.

Then came a detour. He took a break from optometry, ran for Parliament in the UK and narrowly missed winning the seat — a campaign that led him to meet Andy Street CBE, the former CEO of John Lewis Group. Conversations with Street pushed him toward building what he hoped could become the first significant global British eyewear brand. He quit working for a high street optician and began drawing designs the next day.

His brother had recently completed an MBA at the University of Cambridge, and the two of them decided the frames would draw on the city as a design reference. Work happened in a living room: designs drawn on the floor, suppliers called over to the house, the coffee table shifted to make room. The first range was 12 products. The company started in May 2021 and is based in Birmingham, UK.

What it sells and how it charges

From the official website, as fetched on 2026-09-30: the company sells spectacles and sunglasses, as one-time purchases rather than by subscription. Frames listed on the homepage run from £95 to £175 — Market at £175, Cherry at £125, Exchange at £175 and Milton at £95 — with GBP as the default currency. The site carries no separate pricing page, so those figures come from the product listings themselves.

The site also describes the business as founded by a team of opticians with over a decade of experience in the optical industry, and states that every pair of specs purchased commits profits to help end eye disease.

First customers, and what kept growth going

The website went live once the designs were ready. In the founder's words: "We launched the website after the designs were ready and then began selling them via Google Ads." What surprised the team was the behaviour behind those clicks. Customers were booking eye tests at big-name opticians, walking out, and posting their prescriptions over to Cambridge Spectacle Co. Some rang up afterwards to say how much they liked the new specs.

Retention came from somewhere else. Again from the founder: "The biggest thing that turned out to attract and retain our customers was our mission to help end preventable eye disease." Each pair sold contributes profits to eye research, with St Paul's Eye Research Foundation — based at the NHS University of Liverpool Hospitals Foundation — named as the partner, funding work on the mental health impacts of blindness. Ejaz's view was that no one else in the space was doing this.

Reach came from a mix of bought and borrowed attention. Freelancers found through Fiverr handled brand and ad work at a fraction of agency cost, and the marketing budget went into podcasts and social media. When the brand launched into ASDA Opticians, it sponsored the UK podcast Parenting Hell, an arrangement that began when Ejaz contacted Spotify, which put the team in touch with the production company; the hosts read the ad themselves. He also appeared on podcasts including Jimmy Jobs of the Future and Entrepreneurs on Fire, and ended up on the front cover of Optician Magazine after its editors had followed the story for a while.

The numbers

Revenue: $100K a month, as reported by the founder in a Starter Story interview dated 2023-05-16. That is what he said at that date, not a current figure.
Team: 2 founders and 7 employees at the time of the interview.
Started: May 2021, based in Birmingham, UK.
Launch range: 12 products.
Retail footprint: nationwide with a large retail partner across 157 UK locations.
Prices: £95 to £175 per frame, per the official website as fetched on 2026-09-30.
Cost to start: the founder does not state one.

How it compares with the rest of the category

1M.chat's analysis of founder-reported cases covers 1,997 businesses with founder-reported revenue in Starter Story interviews from 2015 to 2026. It is a self-selected sample of founders who chose to be interviewed, not a random sample of all businesses. Within the Fashion, apparel & accessories category:

Measure	Value
Businesses with founder-reported revenue	132
Median monthly revenue	$40K
Share at $1M a year or more	38%
Median employees	2
Share started by one founder	53%

Among the 103 businesses in the category with channel information, the top growth channels are organic social media at 58%, email and newsletters at 45%, SEO and organic search at 44%, and paid ads at 37%.

Set against that, $100K a month is about 2 times the category median. A team of 7 sits above the category median of 2 employees, and the business was founded by two people, where 53% of the category started with one. The paid search that produced the first sales falls inside the 37% reporting paid ads, while the podcast and social push lines up with the 58% reporting organic social. Because the sample is self-selected, these are comparisons against other founders who went on record, not benchmarks for the wider market.

What you can take from this

Make your qualification the product claim. The brand leads with opticians rather than fashion designers, and the official site repeats the decade of optical experience. If you hold a credential in your category, put it at the front of the brand instead of behind it.
Test demand with the cheapest sale available. A website plus Google Ads was enough to learn that people would leave a high street optician and mail a prescription to a brand they had just found.
Go after distribution earlier than feels comfortable. The ASDA Opticians deal was signed less than a year after the idea, and demand outran the plan: the founders expected about seven months of stock cover and were on course to sell out of some models in six weeks.
Attach the purchase to something specific. Profit per pair into eye research was built in from the start and, on the founder's account, is what separated the brand from competitors.
Buy brand capacity in pieces. Fiverr freelancers, a podcast sponsorship arranged by contacting Spotify directly, and trade-press relationships built over years cost less than an agency retainer and gave the story somewhere to run.

Sources

Revenue, team and start-cost figures are what the founder reported at the interview date, not current figures and not a prediction of what you will earn. Product and pricing facts come from the business's own website as checked on 30 September 2026. Method & sources · Disclosure