Republic! Good morning from Forbes’ second busiest airport in the world!

Reid at Dubai Duty Free

With the Republic round LIVE, Chase and I wanted to share one of the aspects of the Dusk business that excites us the most, where we see enormous upside potential: the retail side of the business. 

We are excited to see back to back years where the Dusk wholesale/retail business has grown by more than 3-4x*, and even more importantly we have made great progress in laying the groundwork for explosive retail growth in 2024 and beyond.

The two retail opportunities we want to review with you today are: 

1. Optical retailers 

2. Airports   

Optical Retailers 

We have retail pilots planned with 3 of the top 10 biggest optical retailers in the world (the 2nd biggest in the world, 1 in the top 5 and 1 in the top 10). 

It’s been amazing to see the level of response and excitement that we’ve seen from these massive global optical powerhouses – they can’t wait to launch Dusk in their stores. We’ve been visiting potential stores to include in the pilot and interviewed many of the store associates – the unanimous consensus is that everyone has been waiting for glasses like Dusk that can instantly change tint (and so much more). 

We have the buy-in from top senior management, who have personally been champions of Dusk, to launch pilots in their best stores around the world. They’ve told us that we have their complete support. It’s a very unique opportunity that would normally be unheard of for a startup, but we believe it’s a testament to their belief in our revolutionary technology and game-changing products.

These 3 optical retailers have several thousand stores globally and combined they have almost 15,000 stores worldwide**. To walk you through what the math could look like: 

• If we sold one single pair of Dusk per day per store in the top third of stores (5,000 stores)

• That is almost two million pairs of Dusks per year

• At the current price of $300 per Dusk, that = $547,500,000 per year (that is half a billion dollars!)

• But let’s assume to scale we reduce the average price to $150, that is $273,750,000 per year!

Data for the assumptions:

• In Jan and Feb (our latest months we have data from) we sold two Dusks per day in the Duty Free pictured above at an average price of $275*** 

• This is only the potential sales for three key optical retailers, and only for their top 5,000 stores; you can imagine as we scale to more retailers in more verticals and more stores

• And this is Generation 1 of Dusk and we currently only offer it in one style and two colors… Just imagine the opportunity when we have Dusk Generation 2 + Dusk Sport + Dusk Indoor + Dusk Goggles + Dusk AR + other products and technologies we have in development and on the roadmap, each in dozens of styles and colors… 

79% of the $323B optical market is brick and mortar after all … it is a very big market.**** 

And, of course, we have many other pilots, either already launched or planned, across optical chains, independent optical, consumer electronics, speciality, DIY, mass, travel & airports and sports action adventure and more.  

Airports

With almost 150 million passengers flowing through Dusk airports already, we are getting Dusk in front of an enormous number of high-value potential customers.*******

2023 Dusk airport sales grew over 500% YoY.** And that growth trajectory has continued into 2024 as January and February 2024 were our biggest months of all time in airports.***

But what is exciting and powerful about the Dusk airport story is that airports are more than just a sales channel – they serve as a potent marketing and brand-awareness vehicle. 

With the success of Dusk in the Dubai and Singapore airports, we are looking to immediately expand into more top airports around the world. We are pitching InMotion in the USA and Capi in Europe. These two chains represent almost 200 stores across 100+ airports.******

Our goal is to rapidly expand to airports with over one billion total travelers per year. 

Stay tuned for Dusk coming to an airport, an optical store and many other retailers near you!

Reid & Chase

*sales according to 2023 management report updated through Nov 2 2023; Calendar year sales are sales placed during 2022 and 2023 calendar year; Dusk line sales include product crowdfunding pre-sales; final 2023 financials pending

**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenskart; Specsavers has ~2500 locations according to an internal resource; https://corporate.walmart.com/about/location-facts 

***sales according to internal reports provided by Ampere’s airport distributors; 58 units sold for 58,644 AED in January in Dubai Duty-Free

****eyewear market growth rate and brick and mortar share as per Grand View Research

******https://www.voanews.com/a/dubai-international-airport-had-86-9-million-passengers-last-year/7493171.html; https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/changi-airport-s-2023-passenger-traffic-rebounds-to-86-of-pre-covid-19-levels

*******https://www.capi.com/; https://www.inmotionstores.com/location