Gaëtan Gaye launched Alpagota in October 2023 after spotting a gap in the €130bn eyewear market. Less than a year later, the brand is growing rapidly across Europe and Asia, bringing a fresh approach to eyewear maintenance. Gaye stops by Midori House to tell us how it happened. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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I'm Tom Edwards.
Gaetan Gay is the founder of Alpagotta, an elevated eyewear care brand from Antwerp.
With a background in fine watchmaking, Gaieton launched Alpogotta last October after spotting a gap in the 130 billion Euro eyewear market, where cleaning products represent just 1% of revenue.
Since then, the brand has been growing and rapidly across Europe and Asia, bringing a fresh approach to eyewear maintenance.
So how do you manage such impressive international expansion as a young brand in competitive markets like Scandinavia and Japan?
Well, Gyton hopped on the Eurostar from Belgium to join me here at Midori House and tell me more.
We've had quite a few eyewear entrepreneurs on our program, but one of the things I think we often, and as a spectacles wearer myself, that we don't talk about enough, I don't think is taking care of these things.
They're on your face all day long.
We often talk about the glasses themselves, but we don't talk about taking care.
Is that.
Well, I don't know, is that a problem?
Not enough people pay enough attention.
Yeah, indeed it is a problem.
Well, I wear as well, you know, spectacles every day, every minute of the day, except when I'm sleeping.
And the thing with that is that they relentlessly get dirty.
And what people don't realize is that you get a blurred vision and it's more of even a health issue in a way, you know, every blurred vision, because you wear glasses in order to see well and then suddenly you don't see that well.
So that's why, for me, it was something that I needed myself and I was not very enthusiastic about the products that were available on the market in order to care or to clean.
Because right now, what I thought is that the current products available right now are more cleaning products.