WHEN Aron Wohl left England for Jamaica in 1991 because he “wanted to go to Reggae Sunsplash”, little did the self-confessed roots reggae fan know that more than 30 years later, he would be calling the land of reggae music home. At the time, Wohl was a year and a half out of college and was working in the United Kingdom as an optometrist but wanted to travel.

“My plan was to come here, do Sunsplash. If I liked it, I would stay however long I felt,” Wohl said as he outlined how he ended up in Jamaica. At that time, Wohl was 25 years old and had no responsibilities except to take care of himself. He had also planned on going to India, when he left Jamaica, but those plans were put aside.

But with his eyes set on attending Reggae Sunsplash — the now-defunct annual music festival held in Jamaica from 1978 to 1996 with additional events in 1998 and 2006 (and a virtual event in 2020) — Wohl said he also found a programme that allowed him to do voluntary work as an optometrist at the Foundation for International Self-Help (FISH) Medical, Dental and Eye Clinic, located on Gordon Town Road in St Andrew, over a three-month period. During that time, he would be paid a third of his return airfare each month, get a place to stay, and a box lunch.

“That was my introduction to box food,” he told the Jamaica Observer. He arrived in April 1991, worked from then until June, attended Reggae Sunsplash in July at the Bob Marley Centre in Montego Bay with “a few mates” who arrived at different times, after which they all travelled around the island enjoying the culture, before the last mate left in September.

Wohl said at the end of his voluntary service, the FISH Clinic asked him to stay and he did, and was paid $10 per patient for his service. In that year, the exchange rate averaged about J$12 to US$1, according to data from the Bank of Jamaica website.

But he said even though he was being paid, for him, the low payment still felt like voluntary work. He would only spend a further year, and left the island for South Africa when his grandfather passed away to attend the funeral, after which he spent time travelling across South Africa and Zimbabwe, before eventually returning to Jamaica, because he felt he had unfinished business on the island.

Shortly after, an optical store, Vision Plus, opened at Sovereign Centre in Liguanea, St Andrew, and was looking for an optometrist, but Wohl said he wasn’t committed and did three days per week with the store, testing eyes and prescribing eyewear. The other days, he said, were spent mostly in Portland.

“Sovereign at the time was the newest, brightest, nice, uptown kind of place and it attracted a different clientele to what I had seen at the FISH Clinic, and I realised that there were people in Jamaica who had a bit of money, and I developed a real good clientele, and I ended up being there about seven years, [but] then I was just unstimulated, because [while] it is a great job… I needed something a bit more. I had to decide, do I go back to the UK or do I stay here?”

He said if he had gone back to the UK it would have been “difficult to be an independent operator with your own store”. His employer at the time was however willing to open another branch, but was worried they would have no one to do the examinations at the Liguanea branch. Wohl said he didn’t want to work between two locations, and so decided that if he was going to remain in Jamaica, he would have to do something for himself.

“First, I looked to open in Portmore. I thought I could still work [at Vision Plus] in the day and then go to Portmore in the evenings when people came home from work,” he said. He decided not to follow through, however, and ended up opening a store in what was then called the Island Life Centre in New Kingston, in April 1999. It is now the Courtleigh Corporate Centre.

“I was well-supported by my clients, which really helped. At the time I wanted to notify them that I was moving, but I couldn’t afford the stamps to write letters to everybody, so we found people who would deliver them at lower rates than the post office within the Kingston 6, Kingston 8 and Kingston 10 [areas]. I sat on the back of a friend’s motorbike and went door-to-door delivering letters. And it really was opened on a shoestring, that store, and it is still there today.” Its first employee was Elsa Figueroa Newland, senior frame stylist at Eye Q Optical, who, even though officially retired since 2019, still works at the company, 25 years later. When she started, she was given the job as the store manager to allow Wohl to focus on his optometry.

“When I started I saw that I could make a difference because I am coming from an area where I know a lot of people and what I did, I encouraged them to get their eyewear from Eye Q,” Figueroa Newland outlined. She said her job interview was done at Wohl’s home, because at the time, the store was not yet open.

Choosing the name Eye Q Optical for the company was a play on the words intelligence quotient (IQ), Wohl noted. The play on words is captured in the company’s tagline, “The Intelligent Choice.”
From the beginning, Wohl said he wanted his company to be different and transparent, knowing that the people would appreciate what they were getting.

“I wanted to raise the quality of frames, the kind of selections. Jamaicans love and embrace glasses as part of fashion accessories,” he pointed out. He came from a fashion frame background, growing up with a father who was a wholesaler of eyewear to optical stores in the UK. Eye Q Optical, he said, was promoting anti-glare features “when it was not popular”. It was also the first store to allow customers to fit frames by themselves.

But working out of the office in New Kingston, the growing clientele meant the space was too small. Figueroa Newland said with the need to expand becoming starker, they started eyeing the store next door, hoping that one day the occupants would move, and eventually they did. Wohl seized the chance to expand the store and even paid to help them move.

“We were lucky, we got well-supported by people from Sovereign. Jamaicans are very loyal. If they like you, they are going to find you wherever you are, even if you want to hide, they will still find you. So I still got a lot of patients today from the 1990s,” Wohl noted. He said patients brought their children and encouraged other family members to get eyewear from the store.

“For me, I never wanted to compete on price, I wanted to compete on quality, value and service and that is really what helped us to make our name,” Wohl added.

Further expansion was to come with a second store opened in Manor Park, St Andrew, and then a third in Drax Hall, St Ann.

Much of the running of the stores in recent years fell to General Manager Carlington Willis, who started as a lab technician before being promoted to being lab supervisor and eventually to his current post in 2021.

“One of the things that set us aside is the products we carry,” Willis said. “You won’t go out and see a dozen of the same thing,” he added. Through his leadership, he was recognised internationally as manager/director of the year in 2022.

The company is also pushing for more people to get their eyes tested. It operates a programme with suppliers in which they go into schools and test the eyes of the students who are less fortunate and need glasses. The screening is done free of cost, and if a comprehensive examination is required, that too is free, as well as the eyewear. Wohl said about 10 per cent of the children screened ended up needing glasses, and said the situation may get worse in the coming years with forecasts suggesting that spending more time on electronic devices such as phones and tablets will make half the world’s population near-sighted by 2050.

All three stores are profitable, Willis added, but things were not always smooth sailing. Wohl said, even though he started the company and worked in it, he became overwhelmed and quit 10 years ago, walking out and leaving an office full of people and no doctor. He said it was then that he sought help from a business coach and the advice given has been valuable.

Looking ahead, he said his intention is now to consolidate, and there are no plans to expand further, though Montego Bay was being considered with a store scheduled to open in January 2020, before Wohl got cold feet and abandoned the plan. Luckily, because the COVID-19 pandemic happened just three months later.

“I would like to grow the clinical side of our business. I see how the market’s changing for buying glasses. A lot more people are buying glasses online, and as I said before, I never want to compete on price; I believe it is a race to the bottom. I think online is good for mass-produced stuff. When it comes to eyewear, for something basic, it probably works out, but the quality is probably poor. But when you have more complex lenses that need to have certain measurements, it works better.”

He has launched a 25th anniversary lookbook to celebrate being in business over the last two-and-a-half decades.

Yet, he still holds one disappointment.

“I am a roots reggae fan, so I came looking for the music of the 70s. But that I never really found,” he said, dropping names like Augustus Pablo (born Horace Michael Swaby) who is his number one artist, though many Jamaicans today, especially young people, would not even know who is the now-deceased roots reggae and dub record producer and a multi-instrumentalist, who was active from the 1970s until his death in 1999.

He also recounted being told that if he wanted authentic roots reggae, he should find Jah Love, which was one of the early sound systems that helped to facilitate the development of dancehall music from the early 1980s with artistes such as Josey Wales, Brigadier Jerry, Charlie Chaplin and U-Roy. Wohl said he was told the Jah Love sound system was playing in Bath, St Thomas. He said a friend of his dropped him off at the session.

“I said, well, this will go on all night long and then in the morning I will find a bus to get back into Kingston. Well, it ended about 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning and I had no where to go, so I slept on the pavement on the side of the street until the first bus came at 6 o’clock in the morning and I took the first bus back into town.”

Still he said while he enjoyed the session, he never really found what he was looking for until he found Gabre Selassie, at a place that is now called the Kingston Dub Club. Selassie is a Rastafarian reggae musician of ethnic Chinese roots who was an understudy of Augustus Pablo. He was instrumental in Wohl meeting Pablo who lived in Lawrence Tavern, St Andrew. Wohl said he and Selassie would drive motorbikes to visit Pablo at his home from time to time to listen music and smoke chalice. He recalled it as the “times I really loved the most”.