The Disrupter Jamie Murray-Wells of Hearing Direct.
“I like causing trouble – that’s the fun bit of starting a business,” says Jamie Murray-Wells, who’s embarking on a fresh project disrupting the fusty hearing aid industry.
He’s using the same model of discounts and strong customer service as his first company, Glasses Direct, which he founded in 2004 with the remains of his student loan. That caused plenty of trouble, because Murray-Wells started the discounted glasses site when he discovered what he claimed were significant markups by high street opticians. Infuriated, some rivals sent legal threats, conspired to keep Glasses Direct out of the General Optical Council and even sent threatening letters to his home address.
“The more they kick and scream the more it means we are doing a good job for our customers,” he says.
His success is not based on developing whizz-bang technologies himself; rather he identified, brilliantly, potential that the web held in an area that hadn’t bothered heeding it.
So undeterred is Murray-Wells that he is now troublemaking again with Hearing Direct, launched last February. It is targeting the 9 million people in the UK who have some hearing loss. “Older people are more computer literate than people think, and have more time to spend online,” he says. With just five staff, Hearing Direct has already turned over £600,000 in its first year.
Murray-Wells doesn’t care that hearing aids and spectacles might not be the sexiest products. “It’s a traditional industry that, like glasses, hasn’t changed for decades and hasn’t been tapped on the web. There aren’t many industries like that left.” He paints a picture of the hearing aid industry as one that has relied on a network of Mercedes-driving door-to-door salesmen. “I did a lot of research. There are old ladies in cottages in Aberystwyth paying £6,000-£8,000 for iPhone-compatible, Bluetooth-enabled hearing aids when they didn’t even own an iPhone. It just smacked me in the face.”
Article source: The Guardian