Ellis & Killpartrick optometrists have been a constant presence in the city of Bath since 1979. Yes, that’s 45 years. Emma Clegg talks to Mike Killpartrick about how it all started and what has changed over the decades.
What was happening 45 years ago? Well, the year 1979 marked Michael Jackson’s breakthrough album Off the Wall, the premiere of Monty Python’s Life of Brian and the year the Sony Walkman went on sale. Here in Bath, meanwhile, an enterprising duo of optometrists decided to open their first practice as Ellis & Killpartrick in George Street.
Mike Killpartrick says, “The company was started in 1979 by myself and Brian Ellis who I met at Bradford University. We got on well and we said that one day we’d start a practice together. Then Brian contacted me quite a few years later and said he’d found some premises in George Street. We were both optometrists, but we didn’t really have any idea about running a business, but we were both interested in contact lenses and we built up our knowledge of eyewear brands. It just developed from there.”
Brian Ellis left the business in 1985, but the Bath practice grew steadily, leading to Mike opening a new practice in Cheltenham in 1994, which he says is now very similar in size, turnover and patient numbers to Bath. The third practice in Tetbury opened three years ago.
Surely the changes in eyewear science must have have been dramatic since the opening of the Bath practice…?
“When we started, soft contact lenses were becoming increasingly widely used – I remember them being considered ‘newfangled’ when we were at university! Modern contact lenses are just amazing little bits of technology and I feel very privileged to have been on that journey seeing them get better and better”, says Mike.
Another big shift came in the 2000s when cameras were brought in to take pictures of the back of the eye. “In the old days we used to scribble a few notes about anything we thought was significant. When I was at university we were told to make a very detailed drawing of what we saw, with the optimistic notion that when the customer came back a couple of years later you could refer back to this amazing drawing. Now retinal photography is a fantastic and accurate tool for monitoring the health of the eye.”
Mike explains that this back of the eye photography checks eye health and general health, and is particularly helpful for patients with diabetes, because this helps to spot eye problems caused by the condition before they affect a person’s sight.
The next development was OCT (ocular coherence tomography). “First developed about 20 years ago, OCT is really similar to ultrasound, but it uses light instead of sound. It has gradually got better and better and increasingly affordable, to the point now where I would say that all optometrists use OCT to gather information about the back of the eye. It primarily measures the thicknesses of layers of the retina and enables us to see any irregularities and particularly age-related changes. So it’s been a fantastic breakthrough for all of us. I’ve been using OCT now for six years and it’s still incredibly exciting.”
The practice’s retail journey has also been defined by well-known fashion eyewear brands. “A lady I’d been working for when I worked in London said we should be able to sell Cartier in Bath, which I was nervous about doing, but that’s how we started down that route and for 45 years we’ve carried Cartier as our pinnacle brand.” The company’s other stocked brands include Chopard, Chanel, Tom Ford, Persol, Oliver Peoples, Montblanc, Ray Ban, Gucci, Mulberry and Tiffany & Co. More niche brands are also carried, including several French companies that supply beautiful handmade frames.
“It’s good fun trying to understand how these brands work. LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton) is one of the biggest luxury brands, and there are other big players like Luxottica Group who own Ray Ban, Persol, Chanel and Oliver Peoples,” says Mike.
He explains that there are plenty of webinars and presentations available to help optometrists to understand the changing science around optometry, but because of his natural enthusiasm, it seems this research is not an onerous task. “This is the fascinating thing – when you look into the eye, the eye is actually the inside out bit of the brain. The eye developed as a forward extension of the neural tissue that makes up the brain. There is a lot of interest recently around whether structural changes in the brain with certain diseases like Alzheimers and Parkinsons can be seen at the back of the eye. That’s an interesting area of research which is still developing.
Mike says that children are great fun to work with because they are curious and fascinated when they see the plan that the practice provides showing them the ‘inside out’ bit of their brain. He also explains that the incidence of myopia (shortsightedness) has increased among ages 10-21, a fact that is linked to young people’s high engagement with digital screens.
“There is a strong link between the prevalance of short-sightedness and digital device use. We’ve been having these conversations with parents for nearly 10 years now, trying to bring this to a higher level of awareness. It’s also known that youngsters who spend more time outdoors generally do much better.
“There are now spectacles and contact lenses that have certain features that studies show slow down myopia. They work by adjusting the way the light focuses at the back of the eye.”
Those 45 years have passed in a flash to Mike, but if he thinks back he says his advice to his younger self would be emphatically, “Learn from your mistakes”, adding that it would have helped to have done a business management course to understand more about gross and net profit. Ultimately though, according to Mike, it’s about investing in the team for the good of the business: “All employers know that if you can make a job fun and you’re earning good money at the same time then you’re on to a winner.”
Ellis & Killpartrick,
18 New Bond Street, Bath BA1 1BA;
Tel: 01225 466954 ellisandkillpartrick.com