Lunettes Pour Tous Brand Guidelines: The Paris Optician With a Workshop Behind the Counter

A young founder and a shop in central Paris.

Lunettes Pour Tous — “glasses for everyone” — opened its first shop in May 2014 on the rue de Turbigo, in the Les Halles district of central Paris. Le Figaro reported the opening on 22 May 2014, describing its founder, Paul Morlet, as a 23-year-old entrepreneur from Lyon who had already taken glasses with advertising on the lenses to the United States. 20 Minutes added in 2015 that he had created Lulu Frenchie, a brand of customisable novelty glasses; Le Journal des Entreprises dated that brand to 2010.

Morlet told 20 Minutes in 2015 that the model depended on volume: each shop had to sell a couple of hundred pairs a day, where a traditional optician might sell two or three. The first Paris collection, Le Figaro reported, had 35 frames; Lyon opened with 63.

The other name attached to the company from early on is Xavier Niel, the founder of the French telecoms group Free. BFM Business wrote in 2022 that Lunettes Pour Tous was founded in 2014 by Morlet and Niel, and Le Journal des Entreprises reported in January 2020 that the two men held the company in equal shares. French Wikipedia gives the same founding year and partnership.

The idea was speed and volume. From the start, the company promised glasses made on the spot within minutes, using lenses held in stock and cut to the chosen frame in a workshop in the shop; Le Figaro likened the approach in 2014 to Renault’s Dacia. 20 Minutes and BFM Business called the chain a low-cost optician; its own website frames its offer around speed and an eye examination without an appointment.

The workshop as the shop window.

The workshop is the centre of the design. Le Figaro reported in 2014 that orders at Les Halles were taken on tablets and sent to an edging machine co-developed with the maker Nidek, which cut round lens blanks to the shape of each frame. In Lille, actu.fr reported in July 2017, the workshop sat above the shop and customers could watch their lenses being cut and fitted. In Lyon, 20 Minutes described in 2015 a workshop next to the sales floor holding thousands of lenses in stock.

The supply chain was reported plainly from the start. In 2015, 20 Minutes wrote that the unbranded frames were made in China and the lenses in South Korea. By January 2020, Le Journal des Entreprises reported, the company ran a warehouse of about 4,000 square metres in Lyon’s 7th arrondissement, with lenses and frames tagged with RFID chips, and bought its lenses directly from a single supplier at Danyang, near Shanghai.

The network grew city by city. After Paris came Lyon in April 2015, on the cours Gambetta, 20 Minutes reported, and Marseille followed in 2015, according to French Wikipedia; Lille opened in July 2017 as the fifth shop, according to actu.fr. At the end of 2019, Le Journal des Entreprises reported, there were 16 shops and 420 staff.

Software was built in-house. Le Journal des Entreprises reported in 2020 that a research and development team of 27 people had designed the sales process, run on tablets that took the order, sent the paperwork for reimbursement and passed the job to the workshop, and was working on an app to store customers’ frame measurements. The same report put the company’s offices in the Marais district of Paris.

Two formats stand out. In an interview with Capital in August 2022, Morlet said the company ran three mobile shops in former school buses that toured rural France, and had just opened its first two Belgian shops, in Brussels and Liège; Morlet also told Capital that the historic Les Halles shop had just been refurbished and enlarged, and that online sales were still a small share of the business. Le Figaro reported in March 2023 that it had added a pilot line for making progressive lenses at the back of the Les Halles shop.

Optical retail and its record.

Optical retail chains present themselves above all through the shop sign. The name over the door has to work at street level, on a shopping-centre fascia and on a phone screen, and many chains in this group run more than one name at once. In the Nordic countries, Synsam trades as Synsam in Sweden, Norway and Finland but as Profil Optik in Denmark and Iceland, while Finland’s Instru Optiikka runs Instrumentarium, Nissen and Keops side by side.

Ownership is part of the story these companies tell, and it varies widely. Some chains began as alliances of independent opticians or as co-operatives and buying groups; others grew from a single founder or a family business; still others now sit inside listed groups or private-equity portfolios. Corporate pages on founders, owners and dates are often the most useful material for a designer, because they explain why one network carries several names or why a sign has outlived the company that created it.

Own-label frames are the second constant. Chains in Japan, Brazil, Spain, France, the Nordic countries and the Gulf sell frames under their own range names next to outside brands, and those names are given here as the companies publish them, collection by collection. Store formats follow the same pattern: flagship shops, outlet or second-hand formats, franchise stores and online sales are each described in the companies’ own terms.

The guides in this group set out each chain’s published history, ownership and store network with dates, and then offer an unofficial palette and a type stand-in for reference. They make no claims about eye care, lenses or examinations, and no logo or shop sign is reproduced.

A name that is also a promise.

The founders brought in outside shareholders in 2024. On 10 July 2024 France’s competition authority, the Autorité de la concurrence, cleared the acquisition of joint control of Lunettes Pour Tous by the investment group Quilvest Capital Partners and Paul Morlet, under a purchase agreement dated 4 June 2024. FrenchWeb reported in October 2024 that Quilvest and ODDO BHF Asset Management had taken 29 and 18 per cent of the company respectively, with Morlet and Niel together keeping 53 per cent.

As of October 2024, the chain had 23 shops in France and three in Belgium, according to FrenchWeb. In November 2026 its website listed shops by region across France and in Belgium, and still promised glasses ready within minutes and an eye examination without an appointment. The company sells frames under its own model names, and its range runs from optical frames to sunglasses and sports glasses.

For a design guide, Lunettes Pour Tous shows how a retailer can turn a production step into the shop’s main attraction: the cutting machine, not the display wall, is the theatre. Compare Alain Afflelou, another French optical chain built around its founder, and Atol, the French optician co-operative. For this guide we use an ink blue and a warm yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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