What Lenskart Teaches a Small Shop About Selling Online and Offline (and What It Doesn’t)

Lenskart started in 2010 as a website. It opened its first physical store in New Delhi only in 2013. By 30 June 2025, according to the summary of its Red Herring Prospectus published by Axis Capital, it had 2,137 stores in India and 669 abroad. An online brand went and built one of the country’s largest store networks.

A typical owner I meet runs one or two shops in Vashi, Thane or Kharghar: an optician, a furniture showroom, a mattress dealer, a tailoring studio. They hear “omnichannel” and assume it means an app, a warehouse and a big tech budget. This article answers a narrower question. When you look at what Lenskart actually disclosed about how it sells, which parts can a small Indian business copy at its own scale, and which parts would be a waste of money to try?

1. What Lenskart actually built

Most articles about Lenskart repeat the same few words about online and offline working together. The IPO filing is more useful, because it puts numbers on each part of the model. Here are the ones that matter for a small business reader. All of them are company-reported figures from the prospectus period, not independent measurements.

Source: Axis Capital IPO note on Lenskart Solutions Ltd, October 2025, summarising the company’s Red Herring Prospectus. Company-reported data.

Look at that table as a shopkeeper would. The app, the stores, the home agents and the membership are not four separate projects. Each one handles a different moment where an eyewear customer would otherwise stop: “I need my eyes checked first”, “I don’t know if this frame suits my face”, “I’ll buy it later”, “I’ll go back to my old optician next time”.

That is my reading of the model, and it is the frame for the rest of this article. Omnichannel, for a small business, simply means being present at each of those stopping points, in whatever channel is cheapest for you.

2. Lesson one: do the hard step in person, and do it free

Prescription glasses cannot be sold without a prescription. The filing says Lenskart offered complimentary eye tests across its 2,806 stores and conducted about 1.35 crore of them in India in FY2025. It also says prescription eyeglasses made up over 80% of revenue in FY2023 to FY2025. The free test is the gate to the main product.

Most small businesses have a similar gate. It is the step a customer cannot do from a phone screen, and until it happens, nothing gets bought.

• A tailor or boutique: measurements and a fabric feel.
• A mattress or sofa showroom: sitting or lying on it for five minutes.
• A hardware or tiles dealer: seeing the finish in daylight, next to a sample of the floor.
• A clinic or diagnostic lab: the first consultation or sample collection.
• An interior designer: the site visit and measurement.

My opinion: this is where a local business has a natural edge over a pure online seller. You already have the counter. What most shops miss is making that step obvious and easy to book from online. If your Google listing and website just say “visit us”, you are leaving the gate unmarked. Say what the in-store step is, how long it takes, whether it is free, and give a WhatsApp number to book a time.

See also: Your Google listing is usually where this first contact happens. See how to set up and run a Google Business Profile that brings in calls.

3. Lesson two: take the trial to the customer

For people who do not want to come in, Lenskart sends someone to them. The filing lists at-home trial services among its value-added services and gives a count of 358 home try-on agents as of 30 June 2025. It describes these agents, together with the 1,280 stores added between FY2023 and June 2025, as how it deepened its presence in India, with 64.38% of those new stores outside metropolitan cities.

You do not need 358 agents. You need to decide which of your products justify a visit or a trial at home, and price that into your margin. A few patterns I have seen work for small Mumbai businesses:

• Furniture and furnishing shops sending two or three fabric swatches home on approval, collected the next day.
• Opticians and hearing-aid clinics offering a home visit for elderly customers on fixed days of the week.
• Tile and paint dealers doing a short site visit with samples for orders above a set value.
• Boutiques sending a trial piece with a refundable deposit taken on UPI.

The point is the same as Lenskart’s: the customer’s doubt is “will it suit me, in my home, on my face?” A video call on WhatsApp can answer part of that for free. A visit answers the rest for a cost you can control by setting a minimum order value.

4. Lesson three: treat online and the counter as one funnel

When Lenskart filed its draft papers in July 2025, Inc42 reported that 45% of its Indian revenue came from customers who engage digitally. That figure does not say they bought online. It says they touched the app or website somewhere along the way. Many will still have walked into a store.

This matches what I see in small businesses, even ones with no online store at all. The customer finds you on Google Maps, checks your reviews, sends a WhatsApp message asking the price, and then walks in. If you count only the walk-in, you think online does nothing for you. If you switch off the online part, the walk-ins quietly fall.

What “one funnel” means at your scale

• One customer record keyed on the phone number, whether the customer first came through WhatsApp, a call or the counter. A shared Google Sheet is a fine start.
• The same prices and offers online and in the shop, so nobody feels tricked when they visit.
• A simple question at billing: “How did you find us?” Write the answer down. After three months, you will know which channel feeds the counter.
• Saved details. Lenskart keeps a customer’s prescription. You can keep a customer’s size, measurements, last order or preferred design, and use it next time.

You do not need an app for any of this. A website with your products and prices, a well-kept Google profile, a WhatsApp Business number and a habit of recording phone numbers will cover most of what Lenskart’s app does for a single-location shop.

See also: If you are deciding whether to sell online at all, start with how to start an online store in India.

5. Lesson four: use video to stretch a scarce expert

One detail in the filing deserves more attention than it gets. Lenskart says it launched remote optometry: the customer sits in a store clinic in front of a remote-controlled eye-testing machine while an optometrist conducts the test over video. As of 30 June 2025 it employed 164 optometrists at two central locations, Kolkata and Gurugram, serving 298 stores this way. The stated reason is low optometrist density and better use of each optometrist’s time.

Small businesses face the same bottleneck. The owner, the senior designer, the head technician or the doctor is the person customers want, and that person cannot be in two places. Video lets one expert serve more customers without a second shop.

• An interior designer doing a 15-minute WhatsApp video walkthrough before deciding whether a site visit is worth it.
• A branch run by a junior staff member, with the owner joining a video call for big-ticket decisions.
• A repair shop asking for a short video of the fault before quoting, so the technician’s visit is only for jobs that will go ahead.

6. Lesson five: the real prize is the second and third purchase

Lenskart’s filing includes a striking comparison. Customer accounts it acquired in FY2023 bought an average of 3.62 eyeglasses over two years, against an Indian average of 1.8. It also reported 0.71 crore members of its paid Lenskart Gold programme in India as of June 2025. Whatever you think of membership schemes, the company is clearly built around repeat buying.

Source: Axis Capital IPO note on Lenskart Solutions Ltd, October 2025, operating metrics from the Red Herring Prospectus. The June 2025 customer figure covers three months only, so it is not comparable with full years.

For a small business, the cheapest marketing you will ever do is reminding a past customer that it is time to come back. You already have their number. Most shops never use it.

• Opticians: an eye check reminder 12 months after purchase.
• Salons and clinics: a reminder at the natural interval for the service.
• Water purifier, AC and appliance dealers: service reminders on a calendar.
• Clothing and furnishing shops: a short WhatsApp message when a new range arrives, only to people who opted in.

You do not need a paid membership to start. A simple rule, such as a free adjustment, a free cleaning, or priority booking for past customers, gives people a reason to return to you rather than whoever is nearest.

See also: For the messaging side, including what WhatsApp’s business rules allow, see WhatsApp Business, AI and UPI for Indian businesses.

7. What you should not try to copy

Some of Lenskart’s advantages come from scale and capital. Copying them at small-business size usually wastes money. The filing makes this side clear too.

Sources: Axis Capital IPO note, October 2025; Inc42, 29 July 2025 for the fresh issue size and use of proceeds.

Inc42’s report on the draft papers listed planned uses of the fresh issue that included ₹213.3 crore for technology and cloud infrastructure and ₹320 crore for advertising and marketing. Those are reminders that Lenskart’s joined-up experience is expensive to build and run. A small business should treat it as a direction, not a specification.

8. Where this advice breaks down

I want to be careful about how far a case study like this can be pushed.

• The figures are company-reported. They come from an IPO document, summarised by a broker. They are audited where financial, but operating metrics such as eye tests and agent counts are the company’s own.
• Profit came late. The same filing shows a restated loss of ₹63.76 crore in FY2023 and ₹10.15 crore in FY2024 before a profit of ₹297.34 crore in FY2025. Building both channels at once cost money for years. A small business cannot run at a loss that long.
• Eyewear is unusual. Glasses need a test and a fitting, and people replace them regularly. If your product needs no in-person step and is bought once, much of this model does not apply. A pure online store may suit you better.
• Omnichannel can double your work. Two price lists, two sets of stock and two inboxes go wrong quickly. If you cannot keep the online side accurate, a simple listing that drives people to call is better than a broken online shop.
• Correlation is not cause. The 45% digital-engagement figure shows overlap, not that digital caused the sale.

My view is that the lessons hold for most local retail and service businesses with a physical step in the sale. They hold less well for commodity products sold purely on price, where the customer will go wherever is cheapest that day.

A one-month checklist

Lenskart began as a website and then built thousands of stores to do what a website could not. For a small shop the move runs the other way: you already have the store, so put enough of it online that customers can find the first step and book it.