Mark S. Agnew, CEO
Mark Agnew founded Eyeglasses.com in 1999, and built the company into the internet's leading retail store selling quality eyeglasses, prescription lenses, and sunglasses. Eyeglasses.com operates on a service principle that offers customers significant savings, high quality frames and lenses, large selection, self-help tools, fairness, and kindness. Mr. Agnew is also the Managing Editor of The Vision Magazine blog, "Where Vision Erupts From Truth", a blog dedicated to eyewear as a visionary art form which also intersects with everyday life.
As a visionary in the eyewear industry, Mr. Agnew invented and patented the virtual try on system for eyeglasses, which is now the universal standard for high quality online eyewear stores. Mr. Agnew was issued two patents, which were later sold to EssilorLuxottica Corporation, the world's largest eyewear company.
In 2018, Mr. Agnew wrote The Eyeglasses Buying Guide, which has become the world's most popular and most comprehensive guide to buying glasses online and in optical stores. In his own words:
Since leaving Wall Street to found Eyeglasses.com, I have been the bad guy. Since 1999, I have been an outsider in the tightly knit eyewear industry where suppliers, eye doctors, and retailers work closely together to keep prices high and consumers ignorant. For almost twenty years I have been working to educate consumers, increase their choices, and reduce their costs in eyewear. It is truly amazing that, today, this book is the first consumer buying guide written to educate consumers about how to buy eyewear.
Optical dispensaries, your optician, and optometrists everywhere love to hate the internet and all internet stores. They believe that the internet is destroying their business (it isn't), and the online stores are taking business away (they aren't). The fact that consumers purchase eyewear only once every two years shows what a poor job optical stores are doing about selling their product and services.
Buying eyeglasses has become difficult, expensive, and unpleasant--not nearly as enjoyable as buying shoes. And consider this: Even though eyewear is more visible than any other piece of clothing, most people have only one pair of glasses.
Here's my suggestion to the industry: If you lower your prices, you will sell more glasses to more people, be successful doing so, and improve people's lives. Alas, old habits die hard, and these professionals would no sooner endorse this book and the information I am about to tell you than stick a needle in their eye.
Yet I persist--providing valuable information in this book and on my company's website at Eyeglasses.com--and offer massive choice where choice is limited and sell at reasonable prices. This book will save you time, money, and hassles in your next purchase of eyeglasses--and for me, that is success in itself.
Through 1999, Mr. Agnew was a Vice President at Lehman Brothers, where he was manager of the Emerging Markets Corporate Bond Research group. As the managing editor of thousands of pages of research, his group followed a diverse array of companies across the most important Emerging Markets of Latin America, Asia, and the former Soviet Republics. Prior to Lehman Brothers, Mr. Agnew was a Managing Director at Bear, Stearns, managing and editing the Emerging Markets Corporate Bond Research group. Mr. Agnew was designated an All-Star Research analyst by Institutional Investor Magazine for several years, reaching the #1 position.
Through 1993, Mr. Agnew was a research analyst at Credit, Research & Trading of Greenwich, CT, a boutique firm specializing in bankrupt and distressed U.S. fixed income securities. From 1984-1988, Mr. Agnew was a Vice President at Drexel Burnham Lambert, and Legg, Mason, Wood, Walker in the private client services divisions. Mr. Agnew received a BA at Vassar College in Art History, and an MBA at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Mr. Agnew enjoys mountain climbing, meditation, natural farming, helping the homeless and hungry, and family time.
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