How Mary Perkins’ vision turned Specsavers into one of Britain’s biggest private companies

Mary Perkins jokes that if you were to cut Specsavers’ workers open, “they’ve got green blood”.

She is referring to the culture and staff loyalty she says permeates the British optical retailer she co-founded, whose logo and branding is bright green.

“We’re a family-run company and I think we just treat everybody like a big family — if someone has a problem, you help them.”

Perkins has never worked for anyone else. She has built Specsavers into a £3bn chain over the past four decades, selling spectacles and carrying out eye tests in 11 countries, alongside her husband, Douglas.

At 80, she still works full time and focuses on employees’ wellbeing — her son, John, became a joint managing director in 2007 and is now chief executive. She is a director and attends board meetings, but says she doesn’t “have a job title anymore”. She fills much of her time with a more unusual management task — writing greeting cards. “I just spent the whole weekend writing 500 birthday cards,” she says.

“If anyone has a baby or someone’s relative dies, I will be writing a card . . . It’s caring for the people that are at the sharp end, working really hard every day, to make sure that nobody falls through the net.”

She and Douglas co-founded Specsavers in 1984 from their spare bedroom after selling a small chain of opticians in the south-west of England they previously set up.

The chain took advantage of then prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation of the profession in the 1980s, which allowed opticians to advertise their services and prices to customers for the first time, and is now one of Britain’s most successful private companies, with more than £3bn in annual sales.

It has more than 40,000 employees and 4,900 partners — who co-own the shops alongside the Specsavers group — in countries that include Australia and Canada. It sold more than 23mn pairs of glasses last year and offers a variety of services, including eye tests in shops and increasingly through home visits for customers who cannot travel.

The company’s knack for marketing — almost all its advertising is created in-house — led to the slogan “Should’ve gone to Specsavers”, which remains a staple of British vocabulary more than two decades after it was conceived.

As the company grew outside of the UK, leadership training became increasingly important to ensure “everybody knows what the aims are, what the values are and how to work”, Perkins says, but leading by example was just as key. “It’s a matter of [them] watching me, what I do and how I behave.”

Specsavers has deliberately taken a steady approach to growth at home and abroad, in contrast to some other private companies that have expanded at breakneck speed to establish their presence in other territories.

Perkins cites the company’s entry into Canada in 2021 as an example of its cautious approach. She says she had her eyes tested by about 50 different opticians in the country in 2012 to get a feel for demand and Specsavers only set up there almost a decade later. “It was always on the cards but it was [about] choosing the right time.

“If you know you’re doing something right, carry on and do it, it might take a bit longer . . . If it’s right for [customers], you stick at it.”

Perkins says she grew up oblivious to gender stereotypes in 1950s Britain. She had a younger brother and was raised with her three male cousins, who were orphaned at a young age. “It never occurred to me that there was that difference,” she says.

Only when she went to school, “I came across it slightly . . . [Women] were still expected to be a secretary or a nurse — teaching was a favourite one.”

Undeterred and inspired by her optometrist father, she went on to study optometry at Cardiff University in 1962, one of only five women on the course that year. There she met Douglas and after they both qualified, they established their first optometry venture in Bristol. The chain was subsequently sold for about £2mn.

In 1980, the couple moved to the Channel Island of Guernsey to be near Perkins’ parents and founded Specsavers, this time as a joint venture with other shop owners. Perkins dismisses suggestions that the relocation was for tax advantages.

“Every country we trade in, we pay the tax there. Our support services are in the UK . . . the UK tax is paid.

“I pay quite a lot of tax in Guernsey, they all say [it’s] a tax haven, but no, it’s lower tax, you still pay tax if you live there.”

The early days were challenging, with Perkins doing everything from accounting to training staff and conducting eye tests. “I like the hands on bit, that’s why they can’t get rid of me now,” she says. “It’s a particular type of business and we knew it inside out. We lived it, slept it.”

This led to long hours and time away from home and their three young children. “There was nothing written about [work-life balance] in those days. If I didn’t do that work — I was self-employed — I didn’t get paid. I think you can miss out a little bit on a young family’s life and I’m all for people getting a work-life balance — just be strict with yourself and put it in your diary.

“I didn’t know that all those years ago . . . I’m telling people now, ‘don’t miss out because you can’t recapture that or go back’. That goes for the men in the family as well. I was working seven days a week . . . Of course being my own business I was able to involve [my children] in it.”

The company is a joint venture between the partners in each Specsavers store and the mother ship, headquartered in Guernsey. Each store is part-owned and run by store partners, who receive a chunk of profits. The group owns a controlling stake in each store, although Perkins says that “it never gets to the stage where you have to crack the whip”.

Specsavers holds all the leases or owns the property and collects a turnover-based fee from the partners in return for an array of services such as payroll, branding and marketing, as well as selling products to stores based on customer orders.

The group posted revenues of £3.4bn and pre-tax profit of £327mn for the year to February 28, 2023. The revenue figure was slightly up on the previous year but profit fell from £449mn, after the board decided to absorb inflation, rather than increase prices, and invested more in marketing and technology. It had no external debt and it paid an interim dividend of £15mn to its Guernsey-based parent company during the period, which is reinvested in the wider business, the company said.

About a year ago, Perkins and her husband placed the company in a family trust in a move designed to preserve its culture by preventing any major structural changes and precluding a sale to private equity. Two of their three children and a handful of grandchildren currently work for Specsavers.

“I would hate to think that the Specsavers business relied on me or my husband,” she says. “That’s not responsible for the thousands of people who work in Specsavers.”

“[But] I really did not want the way that we work — the culture and the joint venture partnership in the countries we’re in — to [be] altered and perhaps in the future just become a big corporation.

“I’m quite happy about it and I should go on working for as long as I want to.”