By Andrew Karp
Monday, September 11, 2017 1:00 AM
NEW YORK—The history of the modern U.S. wholesale business can be summed up with two aphorisms: “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” and “Only the strong survive.” The first one applies to the dozens of labs that, over the past two decades, have been acquired by suppliers. The second applies to the wholesale labs that have remained independent. Both types of labs are represented in Vision Monday’s 2017 Top Labs Report, which ranks the industry’s largest labs.
By Andrew Karp
Monday, September 12, 2016 1:00 AM
NEW YORK—Vertical integration. Consolidation. Digital design and manufacturing. Breakthroughs in new materials and processes. The growth of managed vision care. Increasing venture capital investment.
It’s hard to think of a major optical industry trend over the past 25 years that wholesale labs haven’t been in the middle of and impacted by. That’s because wholesale labs are the industry’s middlemen, the conduit between manufacturers and the eyecare professionals and optical retailers that buy their products and services.
By Andrew Karp
Monday, September 12, 2016 12:56 AM
VM’s 25th annual Top Labs Report wouldn’t be complete without the perspective of wholesale lab executives who have experienced the changes that have reshaped the “labscape” over the past quarter century. So we asked some lab veterans what changes they think have been most significant, and why. Here’s what they told us.