PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Geopo­lit­i­cal pres­sures are not yet af­fect­ing busi­ness at Court Op­ti­cal, but the com­pa­ny is keep­ing an eye on the tar­iff sit­u­a­tion.

This was con­firmed by Uni­com­er’s Op­ti­cal re­gion­al man­ag­er John Roberts at the open­ing of the brand’s store in Glen­coe, the com­pa­ny’s 17th lo­ca­tion in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Roberts said, “For us, it’s not re­al­ly an is­sue, be­cause we get a lot of our frames from Italy. That’s the main fash­ion­able frames. So they’ll come in di­rect to the mar­kets from air­freight or we ac­tu­al­ly go to our sup­pli­ers, go­ing di­rect to Chi­na, so right now, we’re watch­ing it care­ful­ly, but we’re not ex­pect­ing any­thing ma­jor to af­fect that.”

He said there had been some in­crease in trans­porta­tion costs, but he said the com­pa­ny did not pass on that cost to cus­tomers.

He, how­ev­er, ad­mit­ted the com­pa­ny had en­dured a tough year, as its mar­ket share had been im­pact­ed by the rise of peo­ple shift­ing to pur­chas­ing glass­es through on­line sites. Roberts said while this was a chal­lenge, he said the com­pa­ny was still push­ing on as the brand pro­vid­ed greater cov­er­age for cus­tomers.

“It has been a tough year, so what we’re try­ing to do is re-im­age the stores. This is the lat­est con­cept for us, fo­cus­ing more on the clin­i­cal side be­cause there’s a lot of com­pe­ti­tion out there. What we found is on­line is rapid­ly com­ing in­to the mar­ket since COVID, but at the end of the day, you don’t re­al­ly get a full ser­vice. What peo­ple don’t re­alise with op­ti­cal is, if you don’t re­al­ly take care of your eyes. That is the route to many dis­eases. So we re­al­ly em­pha­size a com­pre­hen­sive eye ex­am for every­one, at least every two years for 40 years and for 50-year-olds every year,” he said.

Head of the Op­ti­cal Unit for Trinidad and To­ba­go, Kel­lon Craig said the lat­est branch was al­so part of the com­pa­ny’s strat­e­gy to be more avail­able for pa­tients.