Jimmy Fairly brings luxury store service to online booking

For Jimmy Fairly, buying glasses isn't supposed to feel complicated. That's true for when the customer is in the store, and the brand argues it should be true in the digital experience as well when the customer books their appointment. Chief Growth Officier Lucie Allain doesn't talk about booking like an IT problem. She talks about it as part of the same experience as trying on frames. 

Lucie Allain
⁠Chief Growth Officier

The challenge

That's a high bar for a booking system to clear, and there was no room to miss it. A majority of Jimmy Fairly's UK revenue runs through the appointment booking journey. Clinical eye exams and optometrist diaries aren't a side feature, they're the business. As the brand moved into a rapid scale-up phase across France and the UK, the old manual booking process wasn't going to hold. But the fix couldn't feel like a cold third-party tool bolted onto a luxury brand. It needed to be fast enough that a shop assistant could run it without a manual. Flexible enough to bend around real clinical schedules instead of a generic calendar grid. Invisible enough that a customer moving from the website to the exam chair never felt the handoff.

The solution

So instead of sending customers off to a separate booking site, Jimmy Fairly embedded Waitwhile directly into their own website and their internal staff app. No redirect, no third-party branding, no moment where the experience stops feeling like Jimmy Fairly.

For store teams, the payoff is that they stopped thinking about the software at all. Optometrists and managers manage clinic availability, block out custom slots by the week, and adjust schedules remotely from the mobile app. New hires are running the diary within minutes.

"Onboarding new team members is incredibly efficient," noted Michelle Wright, UK Referent Resident Optometrist. "It takes less than ten minutes to train a new employee on how to book, modify, and manage the clinical diary. It is incredibly rare for staff to encounter a hurdle, which keeps our focus entirely on the guest."

That kind of dialogue also shaped what got built next. When frontline staff flagged that clinical bookings needed more context, specifically patient date of birth and prior visit history, the reasoning was direct: get someone's history wrong, and the prescription can be wrong too. Those fields now sit inside the core booking flow, not bolted on as a one-off for Jimmy Fairly alone.

The bigger effect shows up before a customer ever notices it. Automating the scheduling logistics took the admin load off Jimmy Fairly's clinicians, so the time that used to go toward managing a calendar goes toward the person sitting in the chair.

Michelle Wright
⁠UK Referent Resident Optometrist

Data was treated the same way as the booking flow itself: it had to fit into Jimmy Fairly's own systems, not live in someone else's dashboard. Rather than relying on Waitwhile's native reporting, Jimmy Fairly pulls raw booking data straight through the API into their own ERP system, where it feeds the same corporate dashboards leadership already uses to run the rest of the business. 

That's a deliberate choice. As the brand opens new stores across new markets, leadership doesn't have to reconcile numbers from a separate booking tool with everything else, appointment activity shows up alongside every other performance metric, market by market. 

It also means growth doesn't add operational weight. A new store plugs into the same reporting pipeline as every other store. Expansion is closer to flipping a switch than launching a project. A new store doesn't need months to feel like Jimmy Fairly, it inherits the same booking flow, the same data, and the same standard as every store before it.

Lucie Allain
⁠Chief Growth Officier

For Michelle Wright, that mission comes down to something simpler.

Michelle Wright
⁠UK Referent Resident Optometrist