Silmo 2013 - Part 2

We were now getting in to the swing of things and gearing up for a busy show.  Taking our time over the first day to explore the halls, find the locations for our appointments already scheduled and start to find out any new and exciting suppliers was time well spent.  We had business to do, however, and now was the time to do it!

Moving on from Rolf, we headed to the ic! berlin stand.  As an innovative and imaginative company, visiting ic! berlin is always an exciting experience.  When we had spent time with them in New York there had been a live DJ provided a great soundtrack to the experience.  Paris is closer to their home in Berlin, so what was going to await us here?

We were not disappointed!

ic! berlin Stand at Silmo

At the back of the stand was a massive food truck in a very retro camper, shiny, bright and turning out quite amazing food!  The things they were doing with goats cheese was quite incredible.  Over at the other corner sat a car completely shrouded in black cloth - why?  Well you have to park it somewhere!  It was Ralph's own car (the owner and founder of ic! berlin) and he had driven it down to Paris for the show.

While the energy on the stand is excellent, the great thing with ic! berlin is that you know it is backed up by a great selection of eyewear.  Their ranges are unique, well designed, fabulously manufactured and manage to straddle the fine line between cutting edge and perfectly wearable exceptionally well.  The new electric colours available in the ranges were beautiful and selecting pieces to add to our collection in Halifax was easy, these frames won't hang around long!

What about the music?  There was no DJ this time, instead we were entertained by Friederich Liechenstein.  He's a German entertainer (apparently) and a bit of a YouTube celebrity, great fun to listen to and certainly knows how to entertain a crowd!  He's easy to find on YouTube:

After enjoying some wonderful German hospitality, we moved on to our next appointment.  This was one of our Silmo finds from the previous day and right now we are going to tease you a little and keep this one a secret.  We are hoping to have this range with us in early 2014, we have put together a fabulous selection and you know that they are going to bring something new to Nova Scotia if we have selected them, so please don't get all activist like on us and be patient!

Day two was almost complete, however, we had one last appointment to go to - TD Tom Davies.  When we had met with Nathan from TD at New York, twice we ended up leaving the show after the show had closed!  This time we had allowed plenty of time!  It was great to meet up with Nathan and Tom again and to also meet some of the other representatives who cover different parts of the world.  Meetings like this provide a great opportunity to share ideas with some very creative people.

When it comes to frame design and manufacture, there is no denying that Tom Davies has added something completely new and unique to the market.  Being able to say that we are the only company east of Toronto being able to offer this bespoke service really helps to set Ocean apart.  Choosing eyewear should be like choosing a tailored garment, we are all unique after all.  The meetings, though, are a great opportunity for a two-way dialogue and we were able to share a little of our knowledge and enthusiasm for lens technology with Tom as he is working through the process of developing a completely new line of sports eyewear.

A couple of hours later we were all done, new frames ordered, new sample colours organised, the show was closing and it was time to head back to the hotel.  It was a good day, a productive day, but a long day.

Tonight's dinner was in a Japanese restaurant!

Silmo 2013 - Part 1

Dr John Wilson and Dr Euan McGinty headed to Paris at the end of September to visit the Silmo 2013 exhibition.  Silmo is one of the eye events in the calendar each year and is a real destination event, alongside Mido in Milan and Vision Expo East in New York.  It was a big commitment to decide to take the time out of our diary to go and not something that John or Euan decided to do lightly, so, was it worth it?

While it might sound glamorous to say that we head to these shows, unfortunately the truth is quite different.  Travelling east to Europe invariably involves an overnight flight and our routing was even more frustrating as we had to first travel west for a couple of hours to connect via the big TO!  We were on our way, though!

On our way to Paris!

The morning that we arrived, we quickly cleared through French customs and immigration and headed directly to the show from the plane, there really is no time to lose.  Thankfully we had decided to keep our appointments to the minimum for the very first day, using the time to get our bearings and get adjust for the time zone.

In saying that we were looking at a range of beautiful hand crafted Japanese frames within forty minutes of arriving!  Choosing the eyewear ranges that we stock is a bit of a strange blend of business sense, science in manufacture, the art of the frame design and I guess it would only be right to say je ne sais quoi!  These frames weren't for us.

Jason & Karen Kirk

We continued to explore the exhibition halls, looking at frame collections, examining instrument and
technology developments and immersing ourselves in an atmosphere which is definitely an eye geek's heaven.  With great delight on the first day we also met with Jason and Karen Kirk who have moved on from twenty years of Kirk Originals to create Kirk & Kirk.  This definitely looks to be an exciting development by these eyewear innovators and something we are going to be keeping a very keen eye on.

With day one done, we were both flagging and it was time to find our hotel!  We both felt that the first day had been a great way to start our visit, we had discovered some exhibitors that we knew we wanted to re-visit and were excited for our upcoming appointments.

Tonight's dinner was in an Indian restaurant!

Day two started bright and early, well set up by a lovely French breakfast we ventured on to the Paris light rail system and navigated our way to the show.  Our first appointment was not until 11 am, so with a couple of hours to spare we set about exploring an area of the halls that we didn't get to the day before.  It may sound strange but with almost a thousand exhibitors in 80,000 square metres of floor space, this is quite the show.

Bernhard - Rolf Eyewear

The appointed hour came and we met with Bernhard from Rolf Eyewear.  We are incredibly excited to be working with Rolf Eyewear.  They are the masters of eyewear made from natural products and there is quite simply nothing that comes close to their frames.  We had ordered frames from Rolf when we met with them in March in New York (honestly, it only sounds glamorous!) and as of yet we had not received a single item from them.  So why were we meeting with them?

The initial frames we are stocking are made completely from wood, including the spring joint!  Manufacturing the frames is a lengthy process and this was something we were aware of from the outset.  So we had arranged our meeting with a view to finding out what was also available, what was in development and also to look at ordering stock for the following six months.  We were not disappointed!  Rolf has mastered the art of eyewear in materials not just including wood, but also stone and buffalo horn.  While there may be other buffalo horn and wooden frame ranges available (one of our other favourites is Drift Eyewear) there simply is nothing like Rolf Eyewear's take on it.  You'll be amazed when you see them!

That took us through to beyond mid-day on the second day, so that's a perfect place to stop.  Find out more in Part 2!

October is Children's Vision Month

We love seeing children at Ocean Optometry, and we love helping children to be able to see!

This month is Children's Vision Month, so if you need to make an appointment for a child or children you know then please give us a call or send us an e-mail!

Fall into Paris!

September has been a real roller coaster month for us!

I guess in many ways September is a real transitional month.  You know that summer is coming to an end, you start to get in to the various tasks getting ready for winter.  The city is buzzing with the sudden arrival of thousands of students, so although the leaves are beginning to fall, there is also an air of excitement and new beginnings.

Five months in and things have been going better at Ocean than we could have dared to imagine, opening up any new business from a cold start is always going to be a challenge.  Doing it during a global recession surely is economic suicide and who in their right minds would open a business when you are just about to go into its annual quiet spell!  Well, that's us, Ocean Optometry!  Doing things by the book would be so boring!!

We knew that when we opened in April we would face an uphill battle to begin with.  We were a brand new clinic, people didn't know who we were and we didn't have a list of current patients to get us going with.  Part of our reasoning, though, was that this would give us time to tease out some of the issues that every new business faces.  We've got on top of our computer systems, we've settled into our examination routines, all of our equipment is working perfectly and completely integrated.

The best thing about September ... it's starting to get busy, busy, busy!  In the optometry world Fall has always been our busiest time of the year.

The other really exciting event in September is Silmo. 

Silmo is one of THE eyewear expos that happens each year which is a real must for any eyewear geeks.  First held in 1967, it is a perfect occasion for many companies to launch their Fall/Winter collections and for us to meet with designers and manufacturers to find out what's hot and upcoming in the world of eyewear.

Understanding the collections and only choosing ranges which inspire and excite us is something which really distinguishes Ocean Optometry.

At a busy time of the year, it is a real leap of faith to take a week out of our schedule to go to France for this exhibition.  Many people may think of these trips as being like this:

 

or this:

 

 

For us, Paris will be:

 

 

and

 

 

and

 

 

and you know what ... we can't wait!

 

 

 

 

Students - change your underwear!

At this time of year we have many students filling the streets of our fair city.  The sense of excitement the arrive with is almost visible in the air, their heads are filled with big thoughts, big dreams, great plans and (hopefully) a thirst for knowledge.

It can also be a somewhat scary time for the young students.  Taking their first real steps towards adulthood and independence and starting to make their way in the world.  Amazing opportunities will be open to them, the ability to create their own rules, the fun of making new friends and bundled along with this comes the boring bits of life - the responsibilities.

We all have these day-to-day mundane tasks put upon us.  They are chores, every day necessities, perhaps even the drudgery of life, but without them life's a whole lot less pleasant.  To some of the students it's perhaps a bit of a shock to the system that these items just don't seem to magically take care of themselves, a recent conversation on our twitter feed was a perfect example!

@OceanOptometry @ILOVELOCALHFX Awesome! My 1st yr Uni student just phoned in a panic- 2 weeks of dirty laundry & no coins for the machine :)
— ScaryReads (@skodejs) September 4, 2013

Ah, bless them, the little darlings!

What's this got do with optometry, you may wonder.  One of our challenges in the office, though, is in making sure when we are discussing contact lenses we make sure we share our feelings about the importance of a good contact lens wear regime.

Contact lenses bring many advantages over glasses and many people enjoy wearing their contact lenses, either as an almost full time alternative or as an option for sports or social occasions.  One of the main drawbacks of contact lenses, though, is that you are placing a foreign object on to perhaps the most important and sensitive organ of the body.  If our vision becomes compromised the results can be devastating, and yet the approach that some people take to contact lens wear can often be shocking.

When we start chatting about contact lens wear we often ask current wearers simple questions about how often they change their lenses, their lens cases, do they always use fresh cleaning solution.  Many wearers follow good care with their lenses, however, there are unfortunately those that don't.  People may answer that they wash their hands before handling the lenses ... but then they're putting the lenses in to week old stale solution in a case which is several years old! Worst still, people maybe try to get away with saline or some other solution!

As eye-geeks we're fairly protective towards people's peepers and this kind of thing just fills us with dread!  There are some really simple rules about safe contact lens wear:

1 - always wash and dry your hands before handling your contacts;
2 - always replace your lenses as per their proper schedule (most lenses are now either monthly, two weekly or single use daily lenses);
3 - always use fresh solution to disinfect your lenses overnight, allow for the minimum disinfection times necessary and swap out your case as per the solution recommendations;
4 - if you have a problem seek advice as soon as possible.

When we talk to people, reminding them of the basic rules they probably knew at the beginning of their contact lens wearing life, they often admit that they know they've just got in to bad habits, but they haven't had a problem yet.  The important word is the last one ... "yet".  Unfortunately, we have seen what happens when problems arise and they can take hold very rapidly without much warning.

A good contact lens regime can not guarantee that there will never be any adverse problems, but it will greatly reduce the risk of complications.  Just like changing your underwear and doing your laundry (students) will greatly enhance your general quality of life!

I know we've posted this elsewhere, but we do love this video from Acuvue also showing why regular replacement is important: