Beyond the Frame

Sunil Sharma spent 22 years building education, skilling and livelihood programmes before a vision-care project moved him from Delhi to rural Maharashtra. The company he now runs from Gurgaon has stopped trying to sell spectacles and started building the infrastructure other vision-care businesses can run on.

Sunil Sharma, Co-Founder & CEO

The gap on the ground

Vision care found him before the company did. As a director and board member of a not-for-profit, Sunil worked on a programme run with one of the world's largest eyewear companies, and it exposed a gap he had not expected: across rural and underserved communities, basic vision care was simply not reachable. At one point, he reports, the programme was carrying a backlog approaching 80 per cent.

Designing the programme was not the hard part. Trust, local access, delivery and sustainability were. He moved from Delhi to Maharashtra to build the model on the ground, working across language and cultural differences, and around 400 Vision Care Ambassadors were created across the state.

The money was the interesting part. Rather than training people free through donor funding, aspiring entrepreneurs paid a fee, then were supported to open small vision-care centres at block and taluka level. It was a test of whether the model could sustain itself once the grant ended.

One question from that period stayed with him. Someone at the partner organisation asked, in effect: instead of 100 or 200 ambassadors, what if you built a model that created thousands? That was 2016-17.

Years later, having left the organisation, Sunil returned to the idea with a co-founder from the telecom industry who pulled the original assumptions apart. Their conclusion was that the model was far too capital intensive. The first version of Blurry launched anyway, as an online eyewear marketplace. Competing for a sliver of an organised, urban D2C market would take capital they did not intend to raise.

Ninety minutes at the camp

The turn came through a large road-safety vision programme covering roughly 50,000 commercial drivers, run through an institutional partner. Screening camps at the time followed a common pattern: near-vision spectacles were handed over on site, while drivers needing distance correction left with a prescription and a promise. For men whose livelihood depends on distance vision, that gap mattered.

Blurry proposed dispensing both on the spot. A unit at the camp itself, producing and fitting spectacles while screening was still running, so a driver could test, collect and leave within ninety minutes. The team set a working benchmark of 90-95 per cent on-the-spot dispensing, and reports hitting it. It also advised the programme to add a tele-optometry unit, with prescriptions pulled at random from camps across multiple locations and checked centrally, so quality could be validated at scale rather than camp by camp.

What the retail floor misses

That was the realisation. The opportunity was never in selling spectacles. It was in the technology, supply chain and operating systems that make vision care deliverable at scale.

"People think eyewear is simply about choosing a frame and lens at the right price."

The real complexity, in his account, is knowing which product suits which customer, and that takes lens knowledge, dispensing skill and training. Progressive lenses are his example: the choice and the fitting decide the entire experience. Leaving B2C still took him time to accept. What settled it was the size of the unorganised market.

Lean by design

Blurry today is deliberately B2B-first and deliberately lean. Two founders, a mostly part-time team, three people on technology, and two eyewear-industry specialists, one advising on products the company hopes to patent. Sunil reports around 38 direct B2C customers before the shift into institutional work, and cumulative revenue of close to Rs 2.4 crore across those phases. That money, in his framing, bought understanding rather than scale.

Patience is not a strategy

He does not describe a moment when he nearly stopped, only long stretches when progress felt marginal. What helped was refusing to get attached to one business model. What changed things was accepting that patience is not a strategy, and putting a timeline and defined milestones around the business. No early raise, no large team, no aggressive push for scale. Slower, but it left room to pivot.

"Validate early, set deadlines, and be willing to change the model quickly when the market teaches you something different."

The next six months go to launching the MVP of the technology platform with its first customers and institutional partners. Three years out, in his account: 300-500 retail partners across 10-12 states, half a million customers served through them, and at least two patents. And one ambition that is not a number, which is to be known not as an eyewear company but as the company that helped rebuild how vision care reaches people.

Key Takeaways

• Charge for it early. Training vision-care entrepreneurs for a fee instead of free was the risk that showed whether the model could outlive donor funding.

• The pivot came from a delivery gap, not a market study. Drivers walking out of screening camps without the distance glasses they needed is what redirected the whole company.

• Supplying the product was the least valuable part. The strategy, the on-site dispensing model and the central quality checks were what the programme actually couldn't get elsewhere.

• Staying unfunded and small cost speed and bought optionality. No early raise and no large team meant a full pivot from D2C to B2B was still possible.

• Patience is not a strategy. What broke the drift was putting a timeline and defined milestones around the business.

~Editor Shobhit Mehandiratta