The 2025 edition of Vision Expo East came with plenty of firsts beyond frame trends. It marked the debut of the show in Orlando, Fla., held from Feb. 19 to 22 at the Orange County Convention Center, with co-owners RX and The Vision Council reporting the show saw an influx of first-time attendees, comprising of 44 percent of all show visitors. Overall, the event drew attendees from 105 countries, with substantial growth in attendance from international markets including Latin America.
“Our move to Orlando marks an exciting new chapter for Vision Expo East, opening new doors for networking, innovation and industry growth,” Ashley Mills, chief executive officer of The Vision Council, said via a statement. “We listened to our community and enhanced the show experience in meaningful ways, making this year’s event an inspiring hub of creativity, collaboration and discovery. From the latest frame designs to independent labs and medical devices, our inaugural show in Florida highlighted the best in eyewear and eye care and reflects our commitment to supporting the industry at all levels as it grows and evolves.”
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The debut show upped its star power with a keynote delivered by tennis icon Venus Williams. Indycar Team Penske racer and Oakley athlete Josef Newgarden also made an appearance at EssilorLuxottica, engaging in a live booth chat about his racing career, followed by an exclusive meet-and-greet session.
“There were a lot of new customers versus what we’re used to in New York,” said Fabrizio Uguzzoni, president, EssilorLuxottica professional services, Americas. “It brought some customers from Mexico, from Colombia, probably someone from Brazil as well. But 40 percent of the people that we’ve seen are new to Vision Expo.”
Uguzzoni noted the earlier show dates help to kick off the year for EssilorLuxottica, with the Orlando booth highlighting the company’s biggest brands in the Americas. “We concentrated on the brands that are either very strong in the U.S. market or brands that we have launched recently,” he said of the booth layout. “We want to be very sure we were having the brands that probably our customers need to get more familiar with.”
The expansive booth highlighted the three pillars of the EssilorLuxottica business: wearables, their stable of brands and medical technology. “It’s just huge on how we are trying to serve our medical part of our customer bases, so doctors, optometrists and technologies, with all what they need from a technological point of view, but not just at the basic instrument,” he said of the med tech section of the booth. “When you go to take a complete exam on the front of your eyes or back of your eyes, and doing a screening, which is a 360-degree laser, it’s just an insane level of technology.”
The space was anchored with Ray-Ban — which revealed mid-show to WWD that A$AP Rocky had been appointed its first creative director — and the newest brand in the stable, Diesel. “It’s the first time an eyewear brand has a creative director, which puts Ray-Ban exactly where it should be, as a lifestyle brand,” Uguzzoni said.
“How do you maintain the coolness of that brand?” he said was behind the company thinking about Rocky’s new role. “It’s like all the fashion brands — how you maintain the brand in the mind of the consumer, not only from an awareness point of view, but really from desirability. And I believe having someone like A$AP, it’s going be amazing.”
On the brand side, there was a section devoted to what Uguzzoni called “high luxury” frames from Moncler and Persol. “What you have on your face is even not a piece of luxury. It’s a piece of art,” Uguzzoni said, explaining that it takes 13 days to make a Persol frame and they are still produced in the same factory that was used by the brand’s founder Giuseppe Ratti’ “It’s 99 percent manual, even the insertion of the core with the arrow in the temple,” he said of the frame construction.
Three weeks before the Orlando East show, U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval came through for the Nuance Audio collection, an assortment of frames that integrate open-ear hearing technology into a pair of eyeglasses that improve vision and offer users an immersive and clear auditory experience. “Approval was a big deal, “ he said. “Now we have the stamp of the FDA saying it’s a product certified in terms of how effective it is for the patient. We already have hundreds of customers signed up for demo units.”
In the medical technology space, EssilorLuxottica has made strategic acquisitions to strengthen its presence, including acquiring a majority stake in Heidelberg Engineering, a German-based company pioneering high-end imaging and data technologies; Espansione, an Italy-based med-tech company specializing in the design and manufacturing of noninvasive medical devices for dry-eye, ocular surface and retinal diseases, and Cellview Imaging, a Canadian start-up specializing in innovative retinal diagnostic imaging. “Collaborations and partnerships are high on our list of priorities, and we know that to advance in the med-tech space, we must keep learning,” Uguzzoni said.
Definitely one of the most talked-about shows at the last New York Fashion Week was Calvin Klein’s first collection by Veronica Leoni, which heavily featured eyewear by Marchon. “I think our proudest moment was when Kendall [Jenner] wore an optical frame,” said Thomas Burkhardt, president, Marchon Eyewear. “This is a dream for an eyewear company, she comes out and it’s an optical style, which is huge.”
The relationship is an important one for Marchon, since Calvin Klein was the manufacturer’s first licensee in 1992. “It really helped Marchon to become a company,” he remarked.
Burkhardt echoed that the move to Orlando brought in new attendees. “I just talked to an account from West Palm Beach who’s been a Marchon account for a decade. It’s their first Vision Expo. They’ve never made it up to New York, but they were happy to be here.”
Vision Expo West, he explained, is “more of a writing show for us, given the geographic footprint of the western states,” East brings reps they see more frequently, and “therefore placing the orders is less important and it’s more the social component.”
This year’s booth used the “whole information component,” for Marchon and parent company Vision Service Plan, solidifying how to interact with the greater VSP ecosystem. “We can actually make these connections where you talk to a frame customer, but then you talk about a lens product. I think that’s a different proposition for us that we can offer to the people visiting,” Burkhardt said.
The debut of Canada Goose eyewear is fresh out of the box, with its first collection debuting in January and the feedback being “very encouraging,“ he said. “Now we need to see what’s actually selling. It always takes two, three seasons to optimize it. But right now, I have all the confidence that we’re onto something and I think perfect timing launching it in the winter when the brand has relevance.”
In January, Marchon revealed another first to market license with Kendra Scott eyewear due to hit retail in the U.S. in September. “That is a brand that will have significant relevance,” the executive said. “Particularly due to the broad appeal of the brand, because it’s girls from 12 years old to their grandmothers, every generation.”
Burkhardt said there is a lot at the jewelry brand that translates to eyewear. “Our designers are all over it, stones, the color bars and the price point will be very attractive. I think both Canada Goose and Kendra Scott, they’re not stepping on each other at all. We can attract very different types of customers and different price points.”
Pure, one of the manufacturer’s in-house brands, was featured heavily due to a growth in demand for colored frames. “We see color overall performing better. I think there’s more of a willingness to bring color to people’s faces. When we launched the brand in the summer of 2024 we sold out within three weeks,” he said. “That’s a problem, because then you’re putting all your PR communication behind it and you don’t have product. You know what customers do? They buy something else. So, now we’re back in the game. I think it has tremendous potential, even outside of the U.S.”
In 2022 Burkhardt set the goal to have 50 percent of all styles use sustainable material. “We ended 2024 at 40 percent [sustainability],” he said, adding that it is a complex proposition because his designers “need a catalogue of materials available. We need to put out products and styles that are right for the brand, that reflect what the market needs, the price position and valuable position. Sometimes there’s a compromise to be made, but I think we’ve now enriched our toolkit so much that the designers feel confident in what they can bring in the sustainable material. I think we can achieve 50 percent.”
Looking ahead in an uncertain global economy and a new U.S. presidential administration, the executive feels prepared. “I think we’ve learned since 2021 that every year comes with a great deal of uncertainty since 2020. It’s almost like that’s now ongoing. And I think we’re building our plants according to this. The tariffs as they’ve been explained or has been put in place so far, we see them as manageable. I think we can try to offset as much as we can with efficiencies and may have to hand a little bit over to the end consumer, but that’s not decided that yet,” Burkhardt said.
“We’ve worked a lot with our strategic vendor base to diversify our geographic sourcing footprint, which brought a lot of capacity online in Vietnam and Thailand. The capacity there is ramping up to also deliver the quality levels that we need, then we can move product there. So this is not a question of getting out of China, because China is important in terms of just the quality of the product that you can get there, the knowledge, the know-how, the engineering. But having additional factories up and running helps us. If there’s a tariff imposed, us having a more diversified manufacturing, we can manage the risk.”
Over in the independent brand section of the show, Silhouette retuned to Expo, it’s first time back at the show in several years. “We have to really make sure that the world understands that we are what we call the benchmark of premium eyewear,” Hartmut Kraft, president of Silhouette optical, said on the return to the show. “That is a term coined in our headquarters in Austria. I loosely translate that Silhouette is the Rolex of eyewear. We are the pinnacle of eyewear manufacturing. And I’m surprised when I’m traveling in the market to see how little of that is known. But we wanted to make sure that the industry knows about it because first we have to work on the trade knowing about it. With the trade, the consumers will know about it.”
Big news for the brand was the debut of the Clear Sky range, the first eyewear using a new bio-circular material made with organic waste from industries like agriculture, forestry and aquaculture. “That’s the message that’s so important to me, sustainability and corporate social responsibility, two terms that have been just thrown around for the past 10 years, amply baked into the DNA of Silhouette since 1964, since the founding of a company,” he said.
The new bio-circular material reduces carbon emissions by 60 percent compared to the production process of traditional raw materials made from fossil fuel. “Our new collection is built with SPX green plus, which is based on the same properties as our proprietary polymer SPX plus. It’s not something that we discovered as a marketing push tag line, we’ve practiced sustainability since our founding,” he said of the brand, which is exclusively handmade in Austria and fully vertically integrated. “The only thing that we source from Japan is our raw titanium. We then do our own proprietary titanium alloys in Austria.
“We have a 94 percent retention rate in our patients. It’s pretty much once you have a Silhouette, the likelihood is you are staying with us,” Kraft said.