What happened
On 12 November, a year after Lenskart listed on the stock market, founder and CEO Peyush Bansal announced two changes in a LinkedIn post.
- Blue-light filtering lenses are now standard on Lenskart's prescription glasses in India, with no extra charge. Until now they were a paid add-on.
- Bansal said he had often seen parents in Lenskart stores choose regular lenses for their children because of the price difference.
- On Children's Day, 14 November, the first 1 lakh children (aged 5 to 12, per ET) who visit a Lenskart store get free frames and blue-light prescription lenses. Families pay only a ₹199 fitting charge.
- YourStory reports that Lenskart supplies about 3.2 crore eyewear units a year in India and wants to reach 10 crore.
- In July–September, Lenskart's revenue grew 35.7% to ₹2,845 crore, and net profit rose to ₹227 crore from ₹102 crore a year earlier, Storyboard18 reports.
Bansal's line, as quoted by YourStory: “Purpose and profit are not a trade-off.” Lenskart hasn't said what it used to charge for the coating or what the change will cost it. In optical retail, lens add-ons like this usually carry high margins, so giving one away is a real cost.
For a marketing student, the sharper question is what everyone else in the market should do now.
The case
You are the marketing head of an Indian optical chain. You sell about 20 lakh prescription pairs a year and charge ₹600 extra for a blue-light coating. Lenskart now gives it free. Your founder asks: should we match it?
1Clarify
- What share of our customers buy the coating today? This tells us how much add-on revenue we would give up.
- What does the coating cost us per pair? If we make it standard, we pay this on every pair, including for people who never wanted it.
- How many of our stores sit near a Lenskart store? Customers can only switch if the rival is close by or they shop online.
- Who buys the coating? If it's mostly parents buying for children, a partial match may cover most of the risk.
2Structure
- Customers: who will notice the gap, and how many might switch.
- Economics: what matching costs, and what not matching costs.
- Options: match fully, match only for children, or hold the price and explain our value.
- Brand: what each option tells customers about us.
3Analyse
We don't know the rival's real numbers, so we state simple assumptions and test the decision against them.
| Item | Assumption |
|---|---|
| Prescription pairs sold a year | 20 lakh |
| Share who pay for blue-light today | 25% (5 lakh pairs) |
| Extra price for the coating | ₹600 |
| Our cost of the coating | ₹120 a pair |
| Profit on a pair (frame + lenses), before the coating | ₹1,200 |
| Children's share of pairs | 15% (3 lakh pairs) |
Option A: match fully
Two costs add up:
- We lose the add-on price on the 5 lakh pairs that paid for it: 5 lakh × ₹600 = ₹30 crore.
- We now pay for the coating on the other 15 lakh pairs too: 15 lakh × ₹120 = ₹18 crore.
Total: ₹48 crore a year. To earn that back from new customers, we'd need ₹48 crore ÷ ₹1,200 = 4 lakh extra pairs, which is 20% more volume. That's a big ask in a market where the rival is doing the same thing.
Option B: match only for children
Same maths on 3 lakh children's pairs. A quarter of them (75,000) paid ₹600, so we lose ₹4.5 crore. The other 2.25 lakh now get the coating at ₹120, which costs ₹2.7 crore. Total: ₹7.2 crore. Break-even is ₹7.2 crore ÷ ₹1,200 = 60,000 extra pairs, or 3% more volume.
Option C: hold the price
Our total profit on pairs is 20 lakh × ₹1,200 = ₹240 crore. If 5% of customers move to Lenskart, we lose 1 lakh pairs × ₹1,200 = ₹12 crore. Put the other way, a full match only pays for itself if it stops more than 20% of customers leaving (₹48 crore ÷ ₹240 crore).
Based on the assumptions above. The 'hold' cost rises if more than 5% of customers switch.
4Recommend
I recommend matching for children now and holding the adult price for eight weeks while we measure switching.
First, children are where the rival's message is strongest, and parents are the most likely to compare prices. Second, it costs about ₹7.2 crore a year and needs only 3% more volume to pay back, against ₹48 crore and 20% for a full match. Third, it lets us tell a clear story of our own about children's eye care instead of just copying.
The risk is that adults see “free there, ₹600 here” and leave faster than we expect. So I'd track sales in stores near a Lenskart, and if adult volume there falls by more than 10%, we bring the full match forward.