Meet the finalists for the INTERNATIONAL OPTICIAN OF THE YEAR 2024: Vitor Martins (Portugal)

Multi-award winning optician, Vitor Martins, is no stranger to the IOOTY awards as he was also short-listed in 2023.

He has been an optician for 25 years and a businessman in the sector for 20 years. He dispenses high end product and he acknowledges that the search for the best optical products has added a lot of quality to the service he offers and has allowed his business to grow. Specialization and differentiation have been important strategies and Vitor has attended many international fairs, learning and discovering new realities, taking the knowledge and adapting it to his country. It is important that the customer who enters his stores has a different experience, something much greater than selling glasses.

Vitor believes that if opticians don’t specialize the profession will become banal and completely discredited. He is working together with the national association of opticians to ensure that the sector is more valued, having helped to publicize the new national campaign on the quality of products purchased, especially ophthalmic lenses. “When I decided to be a member of the International Association, it was because I thought I could make my contribution to valuing our profession. Realizing that in almost all countries, we share similar problems is something that challenges me a lot. It’s great to be able to talk to colleagues in our profession around the world and learn from it. All our ideas together will certainly make our profession and our sector evolve. That’s why I’m here, to learn and help with the total credibility of our profession.”

He creates links with the local economy and establishes partnerships with other businesses. He employs a “mystery shopper” to feed into the constant improvement cycle where he tries to ensure his businesses are best in the sector, with staff receiving constant training to offer the best to each client.

As an optical professional, Vitor’s mission has been to raise the level of optical quality in the places where he has opened new stores. One of his passions is to grow sustainability and to innovate around this. Last year he opened a store with a completely innovative concept, as environmentally friendly as possible. He used recycled materials and tried as much as he has in other stores to think about the environment. The store separates all the rubbish and donates it to a charity that uses an electric car to collect and recycle it, keeping the money to help with their daily expenses.

Innovation has been one of the pillars of success for his brand. One of the great innovations he made for his company was the “Recycle to Help” project. This project, which is already in operation, goes much further than recycling. Since 2019, he has had another social project that hand-delivers prescription glasses to people who would not be able to obtain them, in needy countries. For some years now, his business has had annual campaigns to collect frames from customers, valuing the old ones and keeping them to use in our missions. “What we started to notice was that we started to receive a lot of old frames that were no longer useful for anything. I then created a recycling project for these frames in partnership with two local institutions, specific to mental disabilities. The project consists of our collection, training users to carry out disassembly and separation and recycling by the entities that keep the profits obtained and all together we promote inclusion and improve the environment a little.”

Vitor started solidarity missions in 2019 and has already visited SÃo Tome and Principe, Peru, Cape Verde, North Macedonia, Kenya and this year Guinea Bissau changing the vision of more than four hundred people. In relation to the recycling project, he has already collected over a thousand frames that were recycled, in addition to giving them a new life, they were included and helped local institutions. This social mission project is the glasses are delivered by hand and because in the six countries he has passed through he always has dozens of volunteers who detect the most vulnerable children and take them to carry out the consultations. “We have contact with the support of the Red Cross and the Portuguese Embassies who help us with all the logistics. All these contacts are made by me and the responsibility for delivering the glasses is mine and the brand’s. I receive the prescriptions and photographs and measurements from patients and choose the frames, order the lenses and together with my team we make the glasses. It is a job of great responsibility, but one that has been improved over these six years. It is an unspeakable happiness when we are on site and hand over glasses to each patient. I know they would never be able to get them otherwise.”

Vitor has given training in local primary schools, institutions and daycare centres about the optical profession, what it offers and its future.

A final word from Vitor about his nomination, “This year I carried out more projects, won national and international awards, which raised my level of learning and makes me want to learn more and take our profession further. This will certainly be another huge learning experience. Thank you to everyone involved for awarding this award. Thank you for giving credibility to our profession and encouraging future opticians to improve the vision of communities and to enhance their quality of life. We should always strive to do better.”