Starting from humble beginnings, two optometrists have built an award-winning practice that puts their patients first.
When young people take the first steps on the challenging path to opening their own business, sometimes it’s with a little help from the Bank of Mum and Dad.
But for two successful Sydney optometrists, it wasn’t so much the bank as the garage.
Lumiere Eyecare is a sophisticated practice in Wentworth Point, owned by partners in life and business, Dr Megan Tu and Dr Wilson Luu.
It offers a full board of optometry and dispensing services to a varied mix of customers in Sydney’s west.
It has all the devices and processes you’d expect from a modern optometry practice, but many of its customers might be surprised to learn of its very humble and unique beginnings, and the poignancy of its current name.
The rise of this particular business might be unusual and certainly unconventional, but the introduction of the pair to optometry will be familiar to many.
Dr Tu’s interest began with a Year 10 high school careers day and a visit from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) optometry school.
“I thought optometry was just, you know, glasses, and then when they talked about the role of the optometrist and the scope of practice, that’s what sparked the desire to actually want to do optometry,” she says.
Like many people who find themselves gravitating towards the profession, Dr Luu’s interest was a little more personal.
“My first interaction with an optometrist was probably when I was six,” he says.
“I got told by my school teacher that there was probably something wrong with my eyes, because I couldn’t see the board and I was always running up to try and copy things.
“I was seeing the optometrist probably every six months, 12 months, and that exposure basically helped me flourish in school.”
Poor eye health extended to other members of his family.
“My grandma eventually started losing her vision and my dad started losing his vision. It was just one of those areas where it’s like, well I want to make a difference.”
Both attended UNSW School of Optometry and Vision Science, but in different cohorts, and both graduated with honours.
Their paths would intersect, but not just yet.
Both went on to take up roles in the regions and, crucially, both would gain valuable experience in corporate and private settings.
Dr Tu experienced the former while working in the shop front of a corporate chain as a student, but her first real job was in an independent practice in regional Bowral, in NSW’s Southern Highlands.
“It was a full-scope, very busy practice, so I got to experience pretty much a little bit of everything,” she says.
As part of just the second cohort to learn therapeutics at UNSW, Dr Tu was the only therapeutically endorsed optometrist at the practice, “so I was managing pathology and developing my skills in vision therapy, contact lenses and other aspects of optometry.
“It was a good learning experience”.
About three hours north, in Rutherford, inland from Newcastle, Dr Luu was having a similar experience.
He too had started in a corporate setting before taking on a role as the sole optometrist in a busy regional clinic.
“I had to basically stand on my own two feet pretty quickly, and I was seeing a large range of patients, pathologies, difficult contact lens cases, and collaborating closely with ophthalmology up in the Hunter Valley.”
Like his soon-to-be-partner, he too appreciated the experience and the “little bit of freedom in terms of being able to do things myself autonomously”.
But the bright lights of Sydney and familial ties drew them back in, and both returned to the city, where Dr Luu started his PhD on the use of virtual reality in assessing vision and Dr Tu continued her association with the Young Optometrists (YO) support group, which she helped set up after graduating in 2011.
It was here that two paths that had seemed to run parallel for so long finally intersected.
Both would end up sharing key leadership roles in YO.
The pair became the partnership, a powerful coupling of drive and ideas, and a vision for their own practice that offered a holistic and individualised approach.
But Dr Tu already had a day job as a mobile optometrist visiting schools, Dr Luu was working on his PhD, and neither had the money to start a business, so for the time being that vision extended to Dr Tu’s parents’ garage.
“It’s a detached garage with its own back entrance and street entrance,” she says. “So we divided the garage so one side was the waiting room and the other was the consulting room.”
Patients were offered testing and a small range of frames.
Using their savings they bought second-hand equipment, including a phoropter, chair stand, visual field device, and retinal camera for their after-hours clinic.
They also had equipment allowing them to do home visits.
“We found there are people who can’t access eyecare, because they can’t leave the home for some reason,” says Dr Tu. “Also, Wilson does a lot of low-vision work as well and it makes sense to see them in their own home environment, see what their lighting and living situation is like.”
Their first patients were also close to home – mainly family and friends.
“It was a lot of word-of-mouth referrals,” she says, “and then basically that expanded to their friends’ friends and family – it was kind of snowball marketing.”
That meant they were often quite invested in their patients’ outcomes.
“We’ve had emergencies, red eyes, we’ve had retinal detachments, we’ve had foreign bodies,” says Dr Luu.
“We did drive a patient to the hospital at 11 o’clock at night once, and then had to sit through the whole thing with them to translate.”
He was happy to get out from behind his computer to put his clinical knowledge into practice, but also all of the knowledge, structure and financial discipline he learnt from his time in corporate practice.
“I think that was really powerful in terms of a corporate structure and knowing what the next steps are and building some routine in terms of practising,” he says.
“It created this kind of thought process in how to run a business, how to run a practice as well. Because you can’t just willy nilly say, ‘look, I want this [device], I’m just going to do it’. You need to make a plan for yourself on how you are going to achieve it and what is the return on your investment from doing what you’re proposing.
“It’s helped me look at optometry, not just as a health role, but obviously, if you want to take care of your patients, you also need to look after your business as well.”
That thinking has helped their “baby” grow.
After two years in the garage, stress-testing their new business, building a good client base and minimising financial risk by using cheaper, second-hand equipment, they took on a loan to buy a new OCT device and the next step – opening the Wentworth Point practice in 2020.
They named it Lumiere, the French word for ‘light’, to honour the work done previously to provide a light for patients in their after-hours, sometimes late-night clinic.
Not even COVID-19 and the first of NSW’s lockdowns could hold them back: it actually helped the couple secure government financial support and training subsidies, and lockdown rules brought local customers who might have previously gone further afield.
All of that and the support of many of their ‘garage’ customers means the loan for the OCT is long gone and they have been able to build a practice that still conducts home visits and has a reputation for award-winning, patient-centric care.
“We’ve been growing year on year, which has been fantastic, and we’ve gotten a few finalist awards for the local business awards,” says Dr Luu.
“We just got an award from University of Western Australia as an inspiring educator for the clinical placements we were doing with students last year,” says Dr Tu.
They’ve grown as clinicians as well.
Dr Tu has a strong focus on children’s vision, myopia control, vision therapy and ocular pathology. As well as Young Optometrists, she is a member of Optometry Australia and the Australasian College of Behavioural Optometrists.
Dr Luu completed his PhD and is also a lecturer and supervisor at the UNSW School of Optometry and Vision Science. He is involved in research and has published in both national and international peer reviewed journals.
As well as memberships in Optometry Australia and Young Optometrists he is a member of the Cornea and Contact Lens Society of Australia.
It’s not just the business that is growing, with plans for potentially another practice or satellite clinics.
The family is a little bigger as well, with a son arriving three and half years ago.
Maybe when their son is older, he too may cast a glance over the family garage and wonder . . . what if.
