The Eyes Still Have It

Just how many fortunes can Bob Hillman make by starting the same business over and over?

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Inch for inch, Route 4 in northern New Jersey may be the most densely populated shopping district the world has ever seen. The road, which serves as a main thoroughfare into New York City, doubles as the primary shopping area for affluent Bergen County. Almost every regional department store -- Filene's, Macy's, Bloomingdale's -- is there. So are hundreds of other merchants, including, it seems, a disproportionate number of opticians.

Heading west out of Manhattan, you first pass a 7,500-square-foot Eyelab -- probably the country's busiest optical outlet, exceeding $4 million in sales annually. Just down the road, there's Lens Crafters, part of the chain that expects to be the nation's largest by year's end, and farther west is a Pearle Vision Center.

But take a look over at Route 4 eastbound. There, right between Lens Crafters and Eyelab -- where Toolerama used to be -- a new optical store is going up. According to owner Robert S. Hillman, The Eyecare Co. will open soon.

Most folks wouldn't open an optical store where the competition is as easy to spot as the big E on the eye chart. But then Bob Hillman, 45, isn't most folks. Hillman created both Eyelab and Hillman/Kohan, a chain that became part of Pearle Vision Center. Eyelab, the first optical superstore, was the model for Lens Crafters and its kith and kin.

So, Hillman knows eye wear. But why is he starting a third chain? Thanks to Hillman/Kohan, Eyelab, and real-estate investments (he is part owner of The Mall at IV, where a Lens Crafters shop is located), he doesn't need the money.

But money, says Hillman, has nothing to do with it. It is a matter of pride. The people who bought his creations, he says, ruined them -- and now he is going to show them how it ought to be done. He might not have bothered, if he could have found something else to do. But he couldn't, and Lord knows he tried.

"After Eyelab, I took 90 days off. I was going to play tennis. I didn't. Travel a lot. I didn't. I was jumping out of my skin and driving my wife and kids nuts." Maybe buying a specialty retailer would help. But Hillman couldn't find anything he liked. How about a restaurant? Hillman came close to opening one, but backed out at the last minute. "I would have been competing against people who know the restaurant business. I don't. I do know the eye industry. I am a very good optician."

Hillman's apprenticeship began in his father's Paterson, N.J., laboratory, which supplied local optomertrists. There he learned technical skills. Travel exposed him to marketing. An optician in Indiana, for whom Hillman worked while attending Evansville College, offered a huge selection of frames. Another, in California, had his own lab so he could promise his customers same-day service.

Hillman remembered all this when he suggested to fellow optician Larry Kohan, who did wholesale prescription lens work on the side, that they open their own optical shop. Kohan took some convincing. What Hillman kept describing, in 1966, had never been done. Instead of the typical 500-square-foot optician's shop, Hillman wanted 2,500 square feet -- and he wanted to carry 5,000 frames, not 500. They would make glasses in one hour, he said, and sell them cheaply: for $15 instead of the then-going rate of $25. Hillman, who had all of $5,000 to his name, needed Kohan's help and money. He got it. What would become the first Hillman/Kohan store opened on Market Street in Saddle Brook, N.J., not all that far from Route 4.

Hillman dreamed of selling 80 pairs of glasses a day. They were doing that within six months, and soon customers had to take a ticket for service -- just as they would at a bakery on Sunday mornings. By 1971, Hillman/Kohan had 15 stores in New Jersey and Long Island, N.Y., $6 million in sales, 25% pretax margins, and one very large problem. What do we do now? Competitors loomed. It was either expand or sell. They sold. Hillman/Kohan became part of Pearle Vision Center. The total price: about $7.5 million, which Hillman -- then all of 28 -- and Larry Kohan split evenly.

Hillman stayed on at Pearle, but grew disenchanted. They weren't his stores anymore. Prices climbed, and it just wasn't fun. He left and started an optical wholesale business while he waited for his noncompete clause to run out. After it did, he started Eyelab in 1980.

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