Dry Eye Shop is a mission-driven small business serving corneal disease patients since 2005. 

Our vision is not just to serve your dry eye or scleral lens retail needs with professionalism and promptitude. We also aspire to be your trusted information partner and a bright spot in your eye disease journey.

We know all about how confusing it is to select from many similar products, how expensive it is to keep on trying different things, how stressful it is to have a shipment go astray when you're almost out of a critical product, and how worrying it is that your favorite eye ointment or scleral saline may sometimes go on backorder for months at a time or even be recalled. Our job is to lessen the anxiety that comes with managing all the "stuff" our diseases require from time to time.

We're here to anticipate needs, fill in information gaps and be a reassuring voice, as well as an expert supplier that you can rely on. If you can think of anything for us to do for our customers that we aren't already doing, we'd love to hear from you.

Where we are

We are based in Poulsbo, Washington - a ferry ride plus a 30-minute drive from Seattle. Come visit if you're local or traveling in our area!

Who we're here to serve

Most of our customers have corneal diseases.

"Dry eye" product customers may have auto-immune diseases like Sjögrens or RA, or medically induced ocular surface diseases like Stevens Johnson Syndrome or Ocular Graft v Host Disease or post LASIK corneal neuralgia or "garden variety" dry eye or MGD or a host of other related conditions. 

Scleral lens product customers increasingly include anyone in the dry eye categories plus people with keratoconus or irregular corneas caused by refractive surgery or scarring.

Many of you have been on a years-long journey getting these conditions diagnosed and treated and may yet be struggling to make your way through it. Just know that we're here to help however we can.

What we do

Our business has evolved over the years, as you might imagine. These days, we offer a sort of information clearinghouse as well as a commentary on the "stuff" sold for dry eye and scleral lenses. We maintain our own curated collections rather than stocking everything possible - for example, we've chosen to sell exclusively preservative-free lubricant eye drops, gels and ointments, because we want to raise awareness about the role of preservatives. We are constantly developing more educational content for our Knowledge Base, and we love running surveys on dry eye and scleral lens topics.

Perhaps one of the first thing you notice on our site is that we like to counter hyperbolic marketing with common sense product descriptions, and counter impersonal industry-speak with personal narration. 

Product safety has become a growing focus for us in the past several years. with the rise of OTC eye drop safety issues. We monitor these issues very, very closely and communicate frequently with customers about eye drop and scleral lens solution recalls (whether or not the affected products are in our own catalog).

We have found it necessary to take a strong, proactive role in screening and monitoring our eye drop and saline vendors - both the manufacturing facilities and the distributors - and have implemented more and more stringent policies to keep out products that may have warning signs not readily visible. When the worst comes to the worst and recalls happen, we work to get the word out, since not all recalls are publicized.

We love the 'concierge' style service model, where it's all about customers defining how we can help.

Dry Eye Shop also functions as a sort of informal referral center for the Dry Eye Foundation, a nonprofit patient organization (not affiliated with the shop) incorporated in 2018. People come to the shop for stuff, and information, but they often also need disease information and support. So, Dry Eye Shop staff, website, social media and emails will frequently point out relevant Dry Eye Foundation resources and events.

Providing personalized service and focusing on delivering meaningful content - these things are expensive to deliver.  We price our products responsibly. We will never aspire to be the cheapest place to shop and we do not offer free shipping. (There's a very simple reason for the latter, by the way, though it's definitely not obvious: we sell a lot of saline, which is both very heavy and low margin - so it is not economic for us to offer free shipping.)

On the other hand, we want shopping to be fun and affordable, so we work hard to offer plenty of opportunities to get discounts - through weekly specials, steeper holiday sales, loyalty programs, subscription discounts and product 'bundling. We also are happy to direct you (on request) to wherever you can get the best price, and we offer hardship assistance on request.

A personal welcome from our owner

Our roots

The Dry Eye Shop began in 2005 as an experimental retail business running in parallel with a medical support group & advocacy project, the Dry Eye Zone. Our websites, blogs, forums and business evolved and grew quietly and organically for a long time.

About ten years after starting, it became a staffed business, and then went through many new, exciting and challenging periods - such as the saline crisis of 2016, the supply chain issues of 2020+ and the stream of OTC eye drop safety issues that began in 2023. These things keep us on our toes and teach us new ways to anticipate our community's needs!

In 2018, Dry Eye Shop owner Rebecca Petris co-founded the Dry Eye Foundation, and continues to serve on its board. The Foundation and the Shop are not connected in any way - as a nonprofit, Dry Eye Foundation cannot recommend or refer people to businesses. But the Shop can and does refer people to the Foundation all the time. We love this sort of unidirectional partnership. The Shop gets to help people with needs related to products, and then refers people to the Foundation for more needs related to their diseases.

Much has changed about the dry eye and scleral lens worlds since we started business in 2005, including our own role - but the commitment just grows.

Our products

For all the products we collect here, we wrap them in as much practical down to earth information as possible - much of it learned from you. We also spend time trying to persuade companies to modify and improve products and make more products that will better serve our customers' needs.

Our core product areas are, for dry eye:

• Night protection devices
• Eyelid care (hygiene and compresses)
• Lubricant drops, gels and ointments
• We are also big believers in dry eye glasses, but we no longer sell them. We're happy to refer you to good sources, however.

And for PROSE and scleral lenses:

• Preservative free salines
• Cleaning and disinfection solutions
• Insertion and removal devices
• Items for handling and storage, and kits for travel

If there is a product you would like us to stock, please let us know! We'll either get it or let you know why we can't. Sometimes products are out of our reach. Sometimes we decline to sell a product because it is not FDA compliant, or the facility inspections are unacceptable. Some products are not quite 'on topic' for our business or just too far outside our area of expertise. But we're always willing to consider new things!

What we care about

Serving, rather than selling: We do not care for over selling, up selling, hard selling, and, well, pretty much every other kind of selling.  How are you doing and what do you most need? Stuff, information, guidance, encouragement, hope? and how can we help you get it? That’s the bottom line of what we aspire to.

Specializing, rather than generalizing: Your doctor told you to get moisture goggles. That sounds so easy, but in real life, maybe not quite so simple. We embrace all the delectable little details no one else knows or cares about but you and us: The right type of contraption to protect the eyes from drying out overnight… for an individual with severe exposure keratitis? compatible with an Airfit F10 For Her CPAP mask? suitable for someone with chronic edema? with Sjogrens? or a face sleeper with floppy eyelid syndrome - how can we secure them against anything that could abrade the cornea? or what will be the simplest, least maintenance intensive for an elderly patient in an assisted living facility or someone disabled in a group home? What about moisture chamber glasses that someone who deals with the public could dare to show up at work in without feeling like a total idiot? and which are the best lens types for someone housebound by severe photophobia? or which goggles will provide complete wind-proofing for a lady with a tiny, narrow face or a gent with very large orbits?

These things are life and breath to us. We LOVE troubleshooting real world practical stuff.

Being, vs. appearing: Marketingspeak and self-inflating fanfares of every kind, no matter how clever or subtle, are anathema at the Dry Eye Shop. If we have anything of value to offer you, we don't want to tell you. We want to show you. We value transparency, realness, directness. When people send us nice notes, we celebrate and thoroughly savor the moment before we move on with fresh motivation. Your generous words mean everything to us in those moments.

Conversations: Our phone number is prominent, not hidden, and that’s because we WANT to talk to you. We can’t promise a human will always immediately answer the phone. We're a small company, after all. But we can promise to call you back quickly, and to give you our full time and attention when we speak with you, for as long as it takes to help you as well as we possibly can. If you get voicemail, it's because we are providing this kind of service for someone else, and we will return your call as soon as humanly possible.

Understanding: Many people who come to us are struggling on multiple fronts: physically, emotionally, and often financially. We aspire to listen and care and help as best we can. Enough said.

Dry Eye Foundation

In October 2018, Dry Eye Shop's owner Rebecca Petris co-founded the 501(c)(3) nonprofit The Dry Eye Foundation to focus exclusively on education, advocacy and support for people with dry eye disease. The company transferred the Dry Eye Zone and all the Facebook support groups to the Foundation.

Dry Eye Shop continues to use its resources to support and promote the Dry Eye Foundation in all kinds of ways. If you are on our site or emails or order products from us, you'll be hearing frequently about DEF. We encourage you to check it out and become a member to support DEF's work for the community!