There is no future in sight for spectacle manufacturing in Australia. For the past 52 years, Irene Luthy’s factory, Optex Eyewear, has produced up to 2000 frames a week, 48 weeks a year. But soon, she will be lucky to be making any frames at all.
When Mrs Luthy, 82, moved her business from Melbourne to Dubbo in 1972, she landed a winning contract: the NSW Spectacles Program, a scheme providing free spectacles for disadvantaged people in that state.
Chinese imports were on the rise and local frame manufacturers were beginning to collapse, yet Ms Luthy’s affordable, basic, plastic frames were in demand.
But on July 1, after 22 years of partnership, the NSW Department of Family and Community Service determined that Ms Luthy and administrator VisionCare NSW had failed to win the tender and appointed Vision Australia as the new administrator.
The decision has put Australia’s last major frame factory out of business. Today, just half a dozen bespoke Australian frame makers are the lasting ambassadors of a dying industry.
“We are now looking at just 2-3 more weeks,” Mrs Luthy said of the future of her factory.
“I don’t think we should be relying on government, but we are now in a position where a government decision has put me out of a business that I have strived to protect for such a long time.
“Why don’t they like local manufacturing?”
The closure of the country’s last remaining frame factory is emblematic of an emerging “disposable society” in eyewear, said Michelle Guthrie, owner of Melbourne’s high-fashion eyewear store iSpex Funky Spex for 29 years, which has long stocked Mrs Luthy’s frames.
Ms Guthrie said the market had been “flooded with cheap, mass-produced products”. The trend has worsened as ailing independent eyewear stores try to compete with the large franchises.
“Customers complain that they see the same glasses in every store they walk into,” she said. “Before, you could buy a product and sell it a reasonable price, at high quality and it was made in Australia. But for a few dollars less, we are now all getting rubbish.”
As the clock ticks, a hopeful Mrs Luthy searches for plan B. She believes local optometrists will continue to stock her frames. Or perhaps a young entrepreneurial person will wake up to the opportunity to revive the local manufacturing.
“There must be someone out there who want to enter, who think Australia does need an industry. We should do this,” she said.
