Marc Fielmann | Swiss Economic Forum 2025

Yes, he was very assertive, I think. No, actually, the success began with that – you have to go back a bit. In Germany in the 1970s, there was the 'Kassenbrille' – the health insurance paid for glasses, and by some miracle, no matter which optician you went to, there were always six frames and they all looked the same. That meant that at the time, anyone on the street could see that person couldn't afford a nice, expensive pair of glasses. So my father broke that industry rule, to put it mildly, and introduced hundreds of frames at no cost. That was the breakthrough, because about 8 million Germans rushed to us, because they also wanted to look good without having to pay extra back then. That's why he was called the Robin Hood of the eyewear market.

Well, I have the most respect for the customers, because customer needs are constantly changing. For example, in the last 10 years, digitalization was a big topic, and that topic doesn't end. There are new sales channels, new ways to deal with. I think it's important to have a lot of respect – some even say fear – for the customers and their needs. We have to earn the customers' trust every day. I have no long-term contracts; we really have to convince customers every day to buy their next pair of glasses from Fielmann. And in my opinion, that comes from customer orientation, not just talking about it but actually living it.

Our customer is smart, because they don't pay twice as much for the same glasses elsewhere. I've been here a couple of days and I've already spotted some potential in the audience. If you ask about overgrowth, who here wears glasses? And who has theirs from us? Look, a lot of potential. They're all still spending a lot of money elsewhere. No, jokes aside. Our core target group is really broad, as you said, from children to the very experienced. From someone who really has to watch their money to a multimillionaire – we have all kinds of customers. For example, in Germany and Switzerland, did you know, every second pair of glasses comes from Fielmann. That means if you don't have your glasses from us, you're in the minority. And that's because we have half the market share in units sold, but only 20% in revenue. That means McKinseys and bankers always tell us to raise prices, but that's exactly the success. We offer the same glasses at significantly lower prices. And that, I think, is what my father taught me: take less, then you get more. One of the main reasons we are successful and stay successful is that we earn less on each individual pair of glasses or hearing aid, but we sell a lot more.

That's a big question, and I think everyone here can relate. The industries are certainly affected differently by e-commerce, and Switzerland is a special market with customs borders in e-commerce. I think it's important to orient toward customer needs. We have several products. For example, contact lenses are very popular in Switzerland, and more than 50% of all contact lenses are bought online. So there we are like a typical online retailer in an omnichannel model. We have in-store consultation but sell the majority online. But for other products like glasses or hearing aids, the majority are sold with at least one touchpoint in physical stores. Almost no customer buys only online. So the future for our industry is omnichannel, the combination. Just because not many people buy online doesn't mean they don't inform themselves online, book appointments online, or look at glasses online. You need both. But pure online retail, at least in our industry, at least for glasses, is a dying model.

We are training more people, hiring more. Optician and hearing aid acoustician is a good profession. Unemployment is practically zero among opticians and hearing aid acousticians. The skilled labor shortage, which I think affects many of you, also affects us. We could easily hire hundreds of opticians in Germany and dozens in Switzerland, but they're not available on the market. That's why we train a lot. We started training a long time ago. We have 4,000 trainees in the group. In Switzerland alone, hundreds of trainees. But then, I may be competing with some of you when trying to motivate a 15-, 16-, 17-year-old trainee. What helps us is that we, as opticians and hearing aid acousticians, help people, we do good, and we have a solution for everyone. We are a well-known brand. So we don't have a huge shortage, but we could use more so that our customers don't have to wait.

You have to judge whether it's been successful. But I would say we're still here. We've grown a bit, made a billion more in revenue last year, and we're still making money. So I'd say we're still here. Whether it's been successful? Honestly, you know all the cases where it went wrong, and you know cases where it went well. I think it would be a lie to say it's easy. A good generational change is hard work and requires a lot of willingness from both sides.

Well, my father had his very own leadership style and work style. He was a patriarch in the old sense, with all the positive and challenging aspects. On the one hand, he always took care of everyone and everything. He was an absolute workaholic, 16, 17, 18 hours a day, every weekend, no question. But he also wanted to control everything. For example, my father didn't want a website because he never had the quality – the quality was never presented well enough. He would always find some technical errors in the text and say we can't send that out to millions of people. So eventually I wrote all the texts myself with professors and advertising lawyers, and he made me rewrite the text for the contact lens case 100 times. 100 times.

I would say that in the transition phase, we benefited greatly from the combination of experience and innovation. And if I had been allowed to decide everything on my own when I joined the company in my early 20s, we would have made mistakes. If you look at our industry, the goal was not to sell glasses through an online shop; we needed measurement technologies. My father always said he didn't want customers to come to our website, buy a product, expect quality, and get garbage. It took many years, tens of millions in measurement technology investment, until we could actually offer glasses in the same quality. So at the time, it was annoying, yes, I wanted an online shop, of course. But was the path we took the right one? Yes, and I think that's what makes a good generational change: mutual trust, rubbing against each other, and even arguing sometimes, but maybe not showing it too much outward.

I think that's something my father did very well. He always gave me a long leash, as he called it. For me, as a young person, it was actually a bit too much. He put me on a crawler in the garden when I was five and said, 'Go ahead.' When we watched the videos my grandfather took, my father would say, 'Maybe that was a bit early.' And it was the same in the company. He always said, 'Just do it,' and when I asked why he made a decision that way, he would just say, 'gut feeling.' I was young, academically educated, a little analyst who loved Excel spreadsheets, and I always wanted a manual: 'You take the frame, then the price, look at the hinge.' I didn't get that from him. He always gave a long leash and only corrected when necessary. In hindsight, that was very good. At the moment, it was uncomfortable.

Well, what they say about me, you have to ask others. But my father, at the handover, I had already been in the company for 8 years and knew all the people. But what stressed me out a lot, what I always wanted to change but he never did, was to adjust the span of control. My father had 300 direct reports at the time of handover. 300? And I, as an academically trained person who had been at consulting firms and banks, thought, 'Oh my God, 300 salary negotiations, 300 personnel reviews, 300 development plans.' And I changed a lot of that. So my leadership style, I would say, is different from my father's. His was patriarchal, everything through my desk, I decide everything. He knew everything, after more than 40 years in the company. When someone came to me and asked, 'Mr. Fielmann, what are we doing with the keratoconus lenses?' I had no idea. So for me, it was a survival strategy and honestly necessary for my own quality of life to delegate. So I would say, for me, it's freedom and responsibility. With the younger generation, sometimes the second part is missing. They love the freedom to decide, but taking responsibility for the results – that they'd rather leave to the company. And I think that has to be in balance: you look at people and see how much they can and will take, give them freedom, delegate decisions. If you don't delegate, you don't know how far a person can go. But then you also look at the results and say you are responsible for your team or business area or decision. That's very important.

Well, to change a culture, you usually need a decade or more. So I would describe our leadership culture and culture in general as in transition. We measure it. We actually combined the succession with a cultural change. There are several dimensions – I won't bore you with all of them – but we've talked about delegating decisions, transparent information, modern leadership. There are a few more. But one key point that might be interesting, if I may speak from experience, is that for the employees, for their partners, etc., the generational change is a very natural break. A new generation comes and wants to leave its own mark and change things. A responsible new generation finds that totally annoying, because they say, 'Oh, now the young guy is here and now they're going digital.' That annoyed me endlessly because I said, no, we're going digital because it's important for our customers, not because of me. But for everyone in the company and their partners, it's very easy to understand. So over time, I became pragmatic. I said, for heaven's sake, if we're going to become more digital and change our culture because you think I want that, okay, let's do it. And nowadays, I hope not too many investors are listening, but when I go to investor meetings – we're listed on the stock exchange – I've actually stolen that narrative. When they ask about strategies and biggest risks, I say, 'I come from the generation, so we took the omnichannel business model, we're fully digital,' and everyone nods. 'He's young, now they're doing digital.' That saves me 15 minutes of presentation and justification. Wonderful. So my appeal to you is to use the generational change for the necessary change in your values. Look honestly at which values are the same, which must stay. For us, customer orientation, performance orientation, sustainability. And which values do you want to adapt? For us, modern leadership, more transparent information, learning from mistakes, delegating decisions. Then use the generational change. Use the fact that it's easy for people to understand: a new generation is here and wants to do some things differently. It doesn't matter if the outgoing generation already did a great job. Overcome your pride, and it also doesn't matter if the new generation says, 'I don't want to be just Mr. Digital.' It helps the company and the culture to understand this change.

Well, I can only speak for myself and a few fellow family entrepreneurs, but I think, if I were to sum it up in two words, I'd say 'expectant and wait-and-see.' There are good things being heard, and I recently read a light article in the NZZ that said we Germans should stop complaining for a bit and just have a little self-confidence and give the government a certain amount of trust. I think that's a very good impulse that I've taken from Switzerland. So for now, I'll say we are optimistic and we'll see what comes in the next few months and look at the results.

Yes, we feel very comfortable in Germany. We're doing well. We may be a bit of a special case as a price leader. When there's a crisis, we've had many crises: the coronavirus pandemic, the Ukraine war, now a recessionary environment with stagnation in Germany. People naturally watch their money and buy their glasses and hearing aids where they get the best price for good quality. So honestly, we've gained a lot of market share. I have to be a bit cautious – if I think about it, you can look at the net investment outflow from Germany and be a bit concerned. For us, in the company, we are also hampered by bureaucracy, especially by the high tax burden. If that changes, we could invest even more. But we still invest in Germany. We have a large plant there, we have 18,000 employees there, and we will continue to invest there. So we are at least there, and the money we earn in Germany, we also invest in Switzerland. So for us as a customer and investor in Switzerland, that doesn't change at the moment.

First of all, don't worry, it's just a matter of time, and as opticians we can wait. [Applause, music] I'll come back to you in 10 years, no problem. I'll also be happy to advise you myself. Just let me know. But to the question about the USA: the USA is an incredibly exciting market, a huge market, an incredibly complicated market. Our markets are very different by geography. The German-speaking area is similar, but if you go to the French-speaking area, it's different. And the USA is completely different. In the USA, if you don't know, 80% of people receive a large amount from their insurance, are insured through their employer, so the insurance system is very complex. A second big difference is that in the USA we also take over the entire medical part. Fielmann Group employs hundreds of doctors, optometrists, who also handle health care. For us, it's a very exciting market because 80% of the American population often get hundreds of dollars from their insurance. That's my average order value in Europe. And they have very few frames to choose from. We talked at the beginning about very few frames for a large amount. That gave us a bit of déjà vu at Fielmann. So you said 500% growth driven by acquisitions, but our organic growth on a comparable basis was already 11% last year. So we see a lot of potential to grow further there, both through acquisitions and organic growth. And tariffs? That gives me sleepless nights.

I believe it's very important. I'm a bit of a counterexample – yes, I gathered some experience elsewhere, but I started at our company with an apprenticeship at age 20, and I had been in the company before. Honestly, I would have wished for more time outside our company. But in our case, my father was 50 years older than me, and he unfortunately died last year. So there was always a discussion. He didn't say you have to do it this way, but he said to me, 'I'm 70 now, I'll do this for a while longer, but I don't know how long I can do it.' Health issues come with age. So it was a compromise. Looking at my life, I would say I would have liked to have gained more outside experience. I would have liked to stay in the USA, for example, longer abroad. I didn't have the time. It worked out. I think it was good for the company. For me personally, it would have been better to have more experience in other companies. And I would recommend that to anyone, because as a successor, you can profile yourself differently if you've already made a career elsewhere and gained experience.

That you have values and stick to them, no matter how hard the times are. Today, there's a lot of talk about decline of values, that people no longer adhere to what they stand for. But people haven't changed, and they find values attractive. They find a purpose, as they say in modern terms, very attractive. And in times of skilled labor shortage – who here is affected? Not at all? A bit, okay. If you are affected by the skilled labor shortage, for the new generation, the question of 'why' is very important, no longer optional. And if you can answer that well – that's our reason for existence, our value contribution to society, or these are our values and we stand by them no matter what – then that is very attractive, especially for the new generation.

I think the question is about smart glasses, which are slowly coming. We have them in our branches. There is a lot of development. But you have to understand that behind them are the technology companies that want our data, and they are bringing these products to market heavily subsidized to get more data. You'll see that skeptically here in Switzerland, and I as a German do too, but in other markets it's different. There are actually many markets where there is already a large sales volume. Several million smart glasses have been sold to date. That's a very exciting trend. For us, it's an exciting product that we offer, and we have to watch the development. The more it catches on – it hasn't caught on much yet – the more we will invest in our own development. We've done that in the past too. But what I always observe is that there are waves. There was Google Glass, and then it died. Now there's a big wave again, and we'll see if that wave translates into a sustainable trend.

Yes, I think Switzerland is great. First of all, I feel comfortable here, and I'm not at a loss for an excuse to come here because I like the people. I appreciate not only the Swiss – I worked at a Swiss branch myself. I'll be here again on Saturday. The Swiss have high quality standards, but if you meet them, they pay quite well. So that's good for you. For us, high quality and low prices is a model that works very well here. So we will continue to invest. We've invested almost 50 million Swiss francs here in recent years, and we will continue to invest, open more branches, ten in number. What I also find exciting is that Switzerland is a very attractive innovation location. For example, we have a tele-ophthalmology startup here with eye doctors – a majority stake we acquired. That's characteristic of Switzerland, especially in high-quality, high-innovation fields. Switzerland is totally leading there, and that's why I always enjoy being in Switzerland to look at new business models, because there is a high quality standard, and this platform they built – eye doctors, opticians – we acquired that in Switzerland and are rolling it out throughout Europe. A nice example of a Swiss quality company that we find very exciting, and why I believe Switzerland is not only an exciting market but also an exciting innovation and investment location.

Oh, I'm advertising for Switzerland now. Gladly.