Certified optician Angela Edmondson stands in Spectacles, a frame shop and optical store she opened at 462 Main St. in Damariscotta earlier this month. Edmondson hopes to provide all customers with a personalized experience. I don’t want people to be a number, I want you to enjoy your experience. This isn’t something to be rushed. It takes time to pick out a frame. I want you to be happy with your frame, said Edmondson. (Tiger Cumming photo)
Angela Edmonson started her career in the eyeglasses industry working behind the scenes in the service lab of an optical store when she was called onto the service floor to help fill in. Thirty-four years later, she’s still there, now as the owner operator of Spectacles, a new frame shop and optical store, which opened on March 2.
Located in the Main Street Centre across from Hannaford Supermarket in Damariscotta, Spectacles offers eyeglass wearers a range of options to choose from, as well as advice on how to pick a pair of glasses that fit the wearer’s prescription as well as their style.
“You can have a great pair of looking glasses and a bad pair of looking glasses with the same prescription,” said Edmondson. “Everybody has different visual needs.”
Edmondson’s experience working behind the scenes in the surface lab, where she ground prescriptions into glass, as well as her three-plus decades on the sales floor, helps her provide customers unique advice when it comes to picking frames.
“When somebody gives me their prescription, I’m already calculating what that’s going to look like in a frame,” said Edmondson. “People who have no background like that don’t know what that’s going to look like.”
Spectacles offers customers a wide selection of frames at various price points, carrying value selections for $95 up to $460 for Edmondson’s personal favorite brand, Lafont, which are handmade and imported from France.
No matter the price, Edmondson says that an important part of the Spectacles experience is offering customers peace of mind when it comes to quality.
“The one thing I hate is cheap frames that don’t hold their adjustment or fall apart. I don’t want people to come back because of the product that I sold them,” said Edmondson. “You can do inexpensive without doing cheap.”
In addition to the selling frames, Spectacles’ in-house lab gives Edmondson an edge on the competition when it comes to fitting lenses, with same-day turnaround available for certain prescriptions. Orders on products including anti-reflective coatings and stronger prescriptions can take around one week to turn around.
Above all else, Edmondson hopes it’s the human connection Spectacles provides to customers that will bring people in and keep them coming back.
“I don’t want people to be a number; I want you to enjoy your experience,” she said. “This isn’t something to be rushed. It takes time to pick out a frame. I want you to be happy with your frame. You gain people’s trust, and they come back.”
After decades in the business, Edmondson briefly left the industry to try something new last year and began working in a law office. She said she quickly felt that something was missing.
“There was no communication with other people,” she said. “I missed having conversations with people. I missed being able to sit down and getting to know people.”
This realization made Edmondson revisit an idea she first had a few years ago, starting her own business. With that idea now a reality, building relationships with customers is the priority that Edmondson plans to center her business around.
“I don’t want people to feel like they’re at the deli and I just took their money. I never want that. I want it to be very, very personalized,” she said.
Edmondson also hopes that Spectacles will be a fixture of the Main Street Centre long term, lasting past the end of her career. Edmondson is the third generation of her family to work in the field, and is hopeful that her son, Bo, will make it four by potentially taking over the business someday.
Spectacles is open 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Wednesday and Friday, and from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday at 462 Main St. in Damariscotta. For more information, go to spectaclesme.com.
