Contact Lens Start-Up, Big on Social Media, May Be Bad for Eyes
Contact Lens Start-Up, Big on Social Media, May Be Bad for Eyes
The colorful ads on Facebook and Instagram promise a fantastic bargain: “Stop overpaying for contact lenses. Get 30 contacts delivered to your door for ONLY $1.” Captions like “wow” and “what a steal” splash across images of teal containers and lenses perched on fingertips, urging consumers to act fast.
This social media marketing has been integral to the growth of the online contact lens start-up Hubble since its founding in 2016. It has raised more than $70 million from venture firms and companies like Colgate-Palmolive, which are attracted to its plan to disrupt the contact lens industry by providing a line of low-cost daily lenses through monthly $39 subscriptions. It’s like Dollar Shave Club — for eyeballs.
But Hubble’s early success has been criticized by numerous optometrists and ophthalmologists, who say that its direct-to-consumer model bypasses eye care professionals, that it does not properly vet prescriptions and that it takes advantage of federal regulations to sell customers its own brand of contact lenses. The company, they say, switches people out of their prescribed lens brands and into Hubble’s lenses, sometimes to the detriment of consumers. Those lenses, they say, use a material that some consider to be outdated and can sometimes not fit properly.
By Sapna Maheshwari
July 21, 2019
