1 Thank you Steve and the Vision Council for including me. Just some - PDF document

Good Morning Everyone, I want to thank all the people who have taken time out of their schedules to attend this meeting and presentation. Just as we have in the past, we traditionally deliver these market update presentations right before a Vision Expo event (the day before the show opened) in ‐ person for the folks attending and exhibiting at the Show. For VEW, we usually deliver these types of update presentations (Mid ‐ Year market update presentations) using a webinar format a few weeks before the Las Vegas show. We are going to keep that format in place for 2015, but for our VEE in ‐ person presentation today, we have a little twist on our usual market overview presentation. This presentation will be slightly different from what we usually do with these types of market update Vision Expo presentations. This will be a 90 minute “tag ‐ team” / “back ‐ and ‐ forth” presentation with Dr. Ron Krefman. I will be going over the topline results of our main market research programs in four main groups (usage and total industry performance, Rx eyeglasses, emerging technologies and markets and future outlook and forecast)—proving people with a main overview of the US optical environment with a focus on key trends, drivers and developments. Dr. Krefman, who works as a research consultant with TVC, will be delving into specific components of our VisionWatch database to give you a new perspective on some important trends that we are observing in the US optical market. Ultimately, we just want to review the most important and relevant data we are getting from VW and other market research programs to give you all a better idea of what is happening in the industry and how usage and purchasing patterns are changing with respect to different products, particularly Rx eyeglasses. It’s our hope that this insight and information can provide you with the content you need to make better decisions on how to run your companies. So, let’s get started and dig in. 1

Thank you Steve and the Vision Council for including me. Just some background information on myself. I’m Ron Krefman, OD, 35 years; in the field; I spend the first few spent in academia at the University of Illinois Medical School, then in private practice for 20 some years, always a student of research and outcomes, including work as principal investigator for multiple clinical trials, and publishing peer reviewed studies. I live and work in Chicago as a data science consultant in this industry. My company, focalCenter builds standardized survey instruments, does outcomes analysis, market research studies and benchmarking. So, with the invitation came this enormous data set, and this graphics provides some highlights about the database of 350 k consumer surveys. 2

As you may know, VisionWatch asks a series of relevant questions to consumers, collects the data, and is then reported to you with graphs and charts that you're about to see, all to visualize the market, trends and relationships. What we’ve done now is added statistics to QUANTIFY the significance of those relationships. As always, you might revise you knowledge of industry patterns and opportunities based on the research, and hopefully go back to your offices and use that new knowledge for planning and changing your business for the better. By adding significance testing and statistical analysis we hope that quantifying the findings will add trust to your knowledge – at the 95% confidence level. 3

So, I use statistical tools to find patterns and test significance of findings. Here is a short list of some of the data mining techniques used in building this report and some of the graphical outputs. While this may look intimidating, really we are just looking to point out which differences or trends are significant. 4

Which leads me to a story. So, there’s a guy flying his balloon, and he’s lost. So, he lowers the balloon and spots a man below. He yells down… Hey down there, can you please tell me where I am, and which way I'm headed? The Guy on the ground says, Sure! You're at 43  N; 123  W. You're hovering at 212 meters above sea level. Your inbound speed was 1.83 meters per second “ To which the man in the balloon yells down, Wow! Thanks! By the way, you must be a statistician. I can tell, because everything you've told me is completely accurate; with more detail than I needed, and you told me in such a way that it's no use to me at all! Finally, the man on ground says, I am a statistician, And, you must be in the optical industry! I can tell, because you don't know where you are, and you don't know where you're going. You got here by blowing hot air, you start asking questions only after you get into trouble. And now, you're in exactly the same spot you were a few minutes ago, but somehow, it's my fault! So, if that sounds like your experience with conversations between market research and management, or in applying statistics to running a business, you’re not alone. But our goal is to make this easy and user friendly. So, lets get started. 5

Just as couple important notes before we start this morning. First, this presentation will focus mostly on prescription eyeglasses, eye exams and the overall optical industry. We will talk about contact lenses, readers, plano SG, surgery and eye exams, but only in an overall environmental context. If you’re looking for more information on plano sunglasses or OTC readers, please let me know. We have another market overview presentation later this afternoon during the TVC SRD meeting that will focus on the plano SG and OTC readers market and I am sure you are more than welcome to attend that presentation as well. We also have other reports, white papers, studies6 ,etc… that deal with specific markets and fields in the vision industry. So if you want to learn more about a specific market or subject, you can always come up to me later and I’ll be glad to send you whatever data or reports we have that can answer your question. Second, the slides and notes from this presentation will be uploaded to The Vision Council website later this week. So if you have to leave or miss any portion of this webinar, you can come back. If you have any questions at any point during the presentation, please raise your hands and we’ll try to answer your questions as they arise. For any questions we miss due to time constraints, we will go back and answer them individually later this afternoon after the presentation has concluded. Let’s start by taking a close look at the methods of vision correction that American adults are using to address their vision needs. And all of this information pertains to the 12 month ending period December 2014, the entire one year period from January 1, 2014 to December 31, 2014, with comparison to previous years. All of this information is from a large ‐ scale consumer research program that The Vision Council produces called VisionWatch. And just to give you a little background, VW is a large ‐ scale consumer research study that interviews a demographically balanced sample of 110,000+ American adults each and every year. We ask them anything and everything about eyewear and eye care and most of the data in this presentation is from VisionWatch. 6