How to Choose an Eyewear Manufacturer in India: A Buyer’s Checklist

Most first orders that go wrong were decided badly, not made badly. The factory did roughly what it was asked to do; the buyer simply did not ask the right questions before committing. This is a checklist for that stage — before the purchase order, while you are still comparing suppliers and everyone is being pleasant to you.

It is written from the manufacturing side, which means it includes a few questions we would rather buyers did not ask us. Those are usually the useful ones.

Start with what they actually make

There is a meaningful difference between a factory, a trading house and an agent, and all three will describe themselves as a “manufacturer” in an email.

• A manufacturer cuts, assembles and finishes frames on its own floor. Ask which stages happen in-house and which are subcontracted. Nobody does everything in-house, and a straight answer here tells you a lot about how straight the rest of the answers will be.
• A trading company or wholesaler buys finished frames and resells them. That is a legitimate business, and often the right one if you want existing stock quickly. It is the wrong one if you need a design changed.
• An agent connects you to a factory. You may never learn which factory.

Some businesses are genuinely more than one of these. We manufacture acetate frames and also trade and wholesale spectacle frames, and we say so. What matters is that you know which relationship you are in, because it determines who can actually change a specification when you need it changed.

Ask: Which parts of this frame are made in your facility? If a stage is outsourced, who does it and how long have you worked with them?

Match the material to the supplier

A factory that has spent decades on cellulose acetate is not automatically good at metal, and the reverse is just as true. The tooling is different, the skills are different, the failure modes are different.

If you want acetate, ask about sheet: where it comes from, whether they hold stock, how long a new colour takes to source. If you want metal, ask about plating and nickel release. If you want both in one collection, expect to be working with more than one supplier, or with one that is honest about which half it subcontracts.

Be suspicious of a capability list that includes every material in the industry. It usually means a sales page rather than a shop floor. Our own materials page covers acetate in detail and says plainly that acetate is what we build our production around.

Ask: What material do you make the most of, by volume? What proportion of your output is that?

Insist on a physical sample, then look at it properly

This is the single highest-value step in the whole process, and it is the one buyers most often compress to save two weeks.

Get a physical sample in the actual material and specification. Photographs cannot tell you about weight, surface quality or how a hinge feels on the fiftieth open. When it arrives, check the parts that are hard to photograph:

• The inside of the rim, where the lens groove is cut. Ragged tooling here becomes a glazing lab’s problem, which becomes your problem.
• The underside of the bridge, which is handled constantly and rarely styled for a catalogue.
• The temple tip, where the metal core meets acetate. Any gap now will open up later.
• The marking. If the size marking has half-polished away on a sample the factory chose to send you, consider what the production run looks like.
• Symmetry. Fold the temples and look down the frame from the front. Small asymmetries are visible and, once seen, cannot be unseen by your customer either.

Then wear it for a day. A frame can pass every dimensional check and still sit badly.

Ask: Will the approved sample be retained as the reference for the production batch?

That last question matters more than it sounds. An approved sample that stays on the factory’s bench is a specification. One that goes in a drawer is a memory.

Get specific about quality control

“Strict quality control” appears on every supplier website ever written, including, in one form or another, on ours. The phrase is worthless. The detail behind it is not.

What you want to know is where in the process the checks happen. Inspection only at the end tells a factory what to reject. Inspection through the process tells it what to correct, which is the difference between a delayed shipment and a scrapped one.

• Is incoming acetate sheet checked before cutting?
• Are there dimensional checks after cutting and after assembly?
• Is alignment verified on the assembled frame, against the specification?
• Who does the final check, and against what document?
• What is the process when a batch fails? Rework, replace, or ship and discount?

That last question is the revealing one. Ask it directly and watch how comfortable the answer is.

Ask which standards they can actually build to

For spectacle frames the reference standard is ISO 12870 (Ophthalmic optics — Spectacle frames — Requirements and test methods). It covers construction, dimensional tolerances, dimensional stability at elevated temperature, resistance to perspiration, bridge deformation, lens retention, endurance and resistance to ignition, among others. Several of its clauses map onto essential requirements for CE marking in the EU.

Two things worth understanding:

1. Building to a standard and holding a test report are different things. A factory can manufacture to ISO 12870 requirements without having paid for third-party testing on your specific model. If you need documented test results for your market, say so at enquiry stage and expect it to carry cost and time.
2. Certification claims should be verifiable. If a supplier claims a certification, ask for the certificate number and the issuing body, then check it. This takes ten minutes and occasionally saves a great deal else.

Sunglasses bring their own requirements around UV and optical class, and those vary by destination market. Establish who is responsible for compliance in your contract, because it will not resolve itself later.

Understand the real lead time

Ask for the lead time broken into stages rather than as one number:

• Sampling and approval rounds
• Sheet or component sourcing, if a colour is not in stock
• Production
• Finishing and polishing
• Inspection and packing
• Documentation and shipping

Two numbers matter beyond the total. First, how long an additional sample round takes, because you will probably need one. Second, what happens to your slot if you take three weeks to approve something. Production schedules are allocated, and a delayed approval usually means requeuing rather than resuming.

Also ask what the factory is like in September and October. Capacity in the run-up to peak retail season is not the same as capacity in February.

Get minimums in writing, per model

Minimum order quantity is rarely a single number. It is usually a floor per model, a second floor per colourway, and a different floor again if a bespoke sheet has to be sourced. A supplier quoting one MOQ for a ten-model collection has probably not thought about your collection yet.

Also clarify:

• MOQ per colourway within a model
• Whether sample costs are credited against a first production order
• Tooling or development charges, and who owns the result
• Payment terms, and what triggers each stage

Protect your design before you send it

If you are commissioning an original design, settle ownership in writing before the CAD file leaves your office. A short agreement covering confidentiality, ownership of the design, and an undertaking not to supply the same model to another buyer is normal and reasonable to ask for. Any manufacturer doing serious OEM and private label work will have dealt with this before.

Check the commercial plumbing

Unglamorous, and it is where shipments stall.

• Classification. Frames and mountings fall under HS heading 9003; complete spectacles and sunglasses fall under 9004, with 9004.10 for sunglasses. Duty rates and sub-classifications vary by destination, so confirm against your own tariff schedule rather than the supplier’s.
• Documentation. Ask who prepares the export paperwork and whether they have shipped to your market before.
• Packing. Retail-ready packing, cartons and labelling requirements differ by market and are cheaper to get right on the first run than to rework at destination.
• Incoterms. Agree them explicitly. “We will handle shipping” is not an Incoterm.

Judge the communication, because you are buying it too

Over a two-year supply relationship you will exchange more emails than frames. Response quality at enquiry stage is the best available predictor of response quality when something goes wrong.

What to watch for:

• Do they answer the question you asked, or send a brochure?
• Do they ever say no? A supplier who agrees to everything has either not understood or is not planning to tell you when it slips.
• Do they raise problems with your design before you have paid, or after?
• Do you talk to someone who has seen the shop floor?

A factory that tells you at drawing stage that your rim is too thin to hold at 56mm is more valuable than one that tells you at sample stage, and far more valuable than one that tells you never.

A short version

If you only do four things:

1. Get a physical sample and inspect the parts nobody photographs.
2. Confirm the approved sample is retained as the batch reference.
3. Ask where quality checks happen, not whether they happen.
4. Ask one question you expect a difficult answer to, and judge the answer.

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Evaluating suppliers at the moment? We manufacture cellulose acetate optical frames in Ahmedabad and supply brands, retailers, distributors and importers. If you want to test the questions above on us, send an enquiry with your requirement and we will answer them specifically rather than generally. You can also see how we make a frame or browse the Clarish™ collection.