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A conversation with Darla Shewmaker: How one optical industry veteran is revolutionizing the way practices manage their most overlooked asset.

Every time I talk with Darla Shewmaker, I walk away having learned something new about the optical industry. With decades of experience—starting as an optician in the 1980s and rising to Vice President of Product Development at a major electronic health record company—she's seen it all. Now, as founder of WaveRFID, she's tackling what she calls optical's "last thought": inventory management.

We sat down to discuss why practices are hemorrhaging money through poor inventory control, and how technology is finally catching up to solve this persistent problem.

From Optician to Innovator

Tom Doyle: Let's start with your background. How did WaveRFID come about?

Darla Shewmaker: I actually started in the optical industry back in the '80s—which now seems like a lifetime ago. I know a lot of people reading this probably weren't even born yet! I'm kind of a weird hybrid because I have a math degree, but I'm also a certified ABO Master Optician. Optical has always been my roots and my passion.

I spent about 17 years at an electronic health record company that specialized in eyecare, eventually becoming Vice President of Product Development. During that time, I was in hundreds and hundreds of practices across the country, and I kept having the same conversations with people who all struggled with inventory management.

When I left there, I really wanted to do something meaningful that nobody else was going to give the time and attention. Quite honestly, inventory management is kind of the last thought of all the different software companies out there. There just wasn't anything decent. So we took on WaveRFID as a passion project—let's try to fix this thing that nobody else wants to pay attention to.

The $45,000 Blind Spot

TD: It often feels like inventory takes last priority, even though it's crucial to the bottom line.

DS: Exactly. A single location with between 750 and 1,200 frames—which is pretty average—will have somewhere between $80,000 and $150,000 in inventory sitting on their boards. When you're not managing that much money, it's just scooting out the door in all kinds of small ways. A return you didn't get credit for, price increases you didn't take advantage of when you submitted them to vision plans... There are so many ways practices are losing money because they don't have tools to manage their inventory.

TD: What's your advice to practices still doing things on paper or without proper software?

DS: Step one is deciding you want to do it. You need to make a commitment that you're going to be better, that you're going to take things to the next level. Implementing an inventory system—specifically our system—isn't hard, but it does take a mind shift from "the way we've always done it" to "the way we're going to do it in the future." You need buy-in from your staff.

TD: There's an initial time investment in implementation.

DS: Right. But I would say there's always a huge difference between who people feel like they are, what they think their inventory looks like, and what the real data shows them once they actually have that information.

TD: So people think they know what's happening, but when you dig into the numbers...

DS: Exactly. Two big areas we see all the time: First, where are your retail price points? It's really common that we'll start with a new client and they'll say, "Hey, we're a high-end boutique. Thirty or forty percent of our boards are $500 retail and above." Then we look at their real sales numbers and only 10% of their sales are $500 and above.

What that means is they've got 30 or 40% of the money invested in their inventory that doesn't work for them at all. It's not doing anything to help grow their business. Either their staff doesn't believe they're a high-end boutique, or it's just not who their patient base is.

But it shines a big light on the reality: "This is who we thought we were. This looks like who we really are." So do you want to scale your inventory to match who you are, or figure out how to become who you want to be?

TD: Changing who you are sounds a lot harder.

DS: It can be. But either one of those decisions is going to improve your profitability. Either embracing who you really are or getting to that point where you really are who you believe you are.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

TD: What are the other problems that unmanaged inventory creates?

DS: One of the biggest is credits and returns. For most practices, returns are a hope and a prayer. They throw frames into a box, put a label on it, send it out into the universe, and hope they get credit. Maybe they have some sort of return document that says "30 frames were returned for credit," but it doesn't say what they actually paid for those frames.

So what happens? Let's say you send 30 frames back and a credit comes in for $1,000. The person who gets the credit looks at it and goes, "Cool, we got that credit," files it away, and nobody ever looks at it again.

With Wave, we look at what you got for that frame versus what you paid. One of the most common things we hear is, "Hey, we sent back 30 frames for credit and we only got credit on 25." They're like, "What happened to the other five?" And we pause and ask, "What do you think happened?"

Then it hits them: "Oh my god, has this always been happening?" Chances are, yes.

TD: Where did they go?

DS: Did they make it into the box? Were they actually received at the company? Did the vendor decide they weren't returnable and just not give credit? Or one of my favorites—"Well, there's a 20% restocking fee. We didn't realize there was a 20% restocking fee."

There are so many things happening with returns that kill profitability, but practices have no idea. Their cost of goods keeps creeping up, but they don't know where the holes are that need to be plugged.

TD: It's like a ton of little cuts that add up to invisible losses.

DS: A couple dollars here, a couple dollars there. Then all of a sudden, you priced things so your cost of goods would be at 35%, but when you're doing your financials, it's 45%. Where is that other 10% falling through the cracks?

TD: That's a big chunk.

DS: It's a big dollar that could be used to improve the staff, improve the practice, take an extra vacation, do some marketing. It's definitely impacting everybody's bottom line.

Let me give you a real example. Last year, probably 90% of every frame out there had a price increase with everything that happened with tariffs. And it wasn't a little increase—on average, things went up a minimum of $5. If something went up $5 and your markup is three times, that's $15 out of your pocket on that sale, just on that one frame.

Multiply that by 3,000 sales—which is average for a single location—and that's $45,000 out of your pocket that you didn't get because you didn't use Wave and you didn't use Frames Data.

TD: Wow.

DS: When people ask me if Frames Data is worth the money, I show them a number like that and say, "Is $45,000 worth it to you?"

The Frames Data Advantage

TD: Speaking of Frames Data, what are your thoughts on why it is or isn't valuable to a practice?

DS: We love Frames Data. We always recommend it for all of our clients. I'd say probably 85 to 90% of our clients use it. The only exceptions are if they're dealing with a lot of small independent brands that don't participate, or if they're importing their own frames—we're seeing a trend of people going to Europe and branding their own products to improve their profit margin.

There's a big reason we recommend it. Frames Data does a great job of keeping all the wholesale prices up to date and letting us know when things are discontinued. Sometimes when we start with a new client, they'll say, "We tried to use Frames Data with our EHR and it wasn't great." Well, the reason is that their old system maybe updated monthly, quarterly, or relied on manual intervention.

We update Frames Data every single day. There is not a day that goes by that we are not current with what you have in your database. And we don't just update our data—we update our clients' data automatically.

TD: So you're constantly updating wholesale prices.

DS: Constantly. And that matters. Because price changes are happening all the time—it's not like they all happen at the beginning of the year and you can just update once. It's constant.

RFID: The Game Changer

TD: Can you explain how RFID works and how it's different from what other people are doing?

DS: RFID stands for radio frequency identification. It's all about radio waves. Where a barcode reader uses a laser light that has to get up close to the barcode, with RFID you're sending a radio wave out that activates an antenna inside the tag, which then sends back the information stored in a tiny computer chip.

What this means is we can make everything a lot faster and easier. Where it might have taken two people four hours to do inventory with barcoding—that's eight man-hours—it's 10 minutes with RFID.

TD: Is that the wand thing I've seen people using?

DS: Yeah. That wand can pick up signals from 10 to 15 feet out. You could stand in the middle of the room in an optical and pick up 600 frames before you ever start walking around. We still want everybody to walk around because they've always got stuff stashed under cabinets, but it really takes no more than five minutes to walk the room.

TD: So each frame has its own specific tag?

DS: It does. We print barcodes on the tags so they can use those with their EHR point-of-sale system, but the RFID chip inside each tag is unique. Any frame I pick off the board, I know the day I bought it, what invoice it came in on, exactly how many days it's been there, and what I paid for it to the penny.

We can get really granular with information. If you have the same frame and you got two in April and another in May, when you scan the RFID chip, we can track each one back and know exactly when it came in.

TD: Technology is amazing.

DS: RFID has made a lot of what we're doing faster and easier. With our technology, they can count inventory, create an order, do a return, transfer frames between locations—for larger clients doing centralized models, they just pack boxes for locations, scan them, and assign them to stores. Now they've got accountability for things moving back and forth that they didn't have before.

One of the other cool things we do is a function called "Find My Tag." If you can't locate something in the office, you tell the RFID reader you want to find it, and it beeps louder and faster until you get close and can locate it. If something gets misplaced or someone's got it on their desk in a back room, you can actually locate it.

Speed and Simplicity

TD: You mentioned making everything faster and easier, and we hear so much about how there's no extra time in the dispensary for additional tasks.

DS: Exactly. Going back to what we do with Frames Data—when you get a new box of frames, all you have to do is scan the barcodes on the outside of the packages. You're not limited to scanning one at a time. You can scan 10 or 20 barcodes at the same time and automatically add all those frames into Wave.

We have really extensive pricing modules so you can calculate any retail price, and it'll calculate your cost based on your discount percentages with that vendor for that brand. You add them to inventory, put them on a purchase order, receive that purchase order—all in one flow. It has validation steps to make sure the invoice matches what it should be, ensuring everything's accurate to the penny.

TD: That must save a ton of time and help get frames on the board faster instead of sitting in a drawer somewhere.

DS: That's one of those big eye-openers we face with people. They don't really know how many frames they have. They know how many board spaces they have and think that's pretty much how many frames they have, but they don't realize how many are in the back room and under cabinets.

A lot of the time, they might have 1,200 board spaces but they have 2,500 frames. Take that average of $100,000 in inventory and multiply it by two. They actually have $200,000 sitting in their inventory, and $100,000 of it they weren't planned for.

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The Power of Data

TD: I wanted to ask about your reporting features. What do you think are the most important ones?

DS: We have a combination of dashboards and reports. The fun thing about dashboards is they're really interactive. If I want to look at my whole inventory but then drill down to just see everything over $500 retail, I can click one button and it changes that dashboard. It's a great way to see what's happening without running a bunch of reports, exporting to spreadsheets, and doing manipulation—all the things people don't have time for.

I could say, "Just show me all my Plano sunglasses," and then see how they break out between men's, women's, kids, and different price points. What's normally really time-consuming, we put available in a click. We're trying to put as much data in front of people as possible.

TD: That makes it a lot easier to make decisions.

DS: Absolutely. You can look at how many Plano sunglasses you're selling and maybe have different targets for summer versus winter. A lot of offices don't have planograms where they're really looking at what they want their boards to look like—how many pieces by gender and age group, by different brands, by different price points.

One of our reports is our Frames Data report that shows every frame that's had a price change this year, what that change has been, and how it's impacting their bottom line. They can run that report anytime and get that information right away.

I think one of the most crucial things people aren't used to having is turn rates. I can easily see how well a brand is performing. If I gave this brand 100 board spaces and only sold 20 frames in the last three months, I'm not going to have a very high turn rate.

TD: For readers who might not know, what's a turn rate?

DS: Turn rate means how many times that board space would turn over the course of a year. If I gave somebody 100 board spaces, I'd expect it to turn at least three times—that's industry average for what we'd consider a core product. We look at those statistics, but we also look at profit per board space as another measure, because you may not turn your Cartiers as many times, but the profitability is high.

You need to look at both when evaluating how well a brand is performing for you.

The "Crusty, Musty, and Dusty" Report

DS: One of our reports is a frame rep report. It shows that vendor, each of their brands, all their turn rates, and breaks down all their existing inventory by how old it is. Items over a year fall into what we call the "crusty, musty, and dusty" category.

TD: I love that.

DS: These frames should have been gone a long time ago, but they really need to go now. For every frame on the board, we know exactly how many days it's been there and when you last had a sale. A lot of times, things in the crusty, musty, and dusty category also never sold. It's an interesting correlation.

TD: That's such vital information for running the business. Is there anything new coming up for WaveRFID?

DS: We're working on a couple new projects right now, but I think we're going to keep them under wraps for the moment. Let's just say we've got some cool and exciting things on the horizon, but you'll be the first to know when we're ready.

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To contact WaveRFID, call 844-928-7343 or visit their contact page.

To request a demo of WaveRFID, visit their demo request page.

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For questions about subscribing to Frames Data, call 1-800-821-6069 ext 3 for single location practices, or ext 4 for multi-location practices, or email sales@framesdata.com.