Our company

About the Dry Eye Shop...

We are a specialty retail company based in Poulsbo, Washington.

Our raison d'etre is to continue find new ways to help and encourage you in your individual journey through dry eye and any other corneal diseases you may be struggling with. We are driven by the desire to keep doing better, for each other, for our readers, callers, visitors and customers, for dry eye patients across the board, and for the doctors and researchers and industry who serve them... for anybody and everybody that we can influence for the better in our little corner of the dry eye and scleral lens worlds.

History

The Dry Eye Shop began in 2005 as an experimental retail business running in parallel with an advocacy project (The Dry Eye Zone). Our websites, blogs, forums and business evolved quietly and organically for about the first ten years, much of the time run more or less solo by our founder, Rebecca. In recent years, the growth curve has been steeper, which has presented challenges that keep us all on our toes.

Originally, a key purpose of the Dry Eye Shop was to raise awareness of the more obscure products that can help people with dry eye. Many things have changed since then - there are far more products on the market and there are far more places to purchase them, which is great! We're here as an information clearinghouse; we aim to counter hyperbolic marketing with common sense product descriptions; and we also function as a de facto intake center for the Dry Eye Foundation - people come for stuff, but they have many other needs that the Foundation can help with.

Some products at the Dry Eye Shop are more expensive here than major online retailers not just because we're small (duh... you try competing with Bezos), but also because our business focuses on personalized service, which has costs associated.

In October 2018, we started a separate organization, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit The Dry Eye Foundation,  to focus exclusively on education, advocacy and support for people with dry eye disease. The Dry Eye Zone and all the support groups are now part of the Dry Eye Foundation, and the Dry Eye Shop is a separate entity. Please visit the Foundation and consider supporting our patient advocacy work!

The products

We collect in one place all the products we can find directly relevant to the people we care about, and we wrap them in as much practical down to earth information as possible (much of it learned from you). When that's not enough, we do our best to persuade, coax, cajole, and entice 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

How do we choose products? That's a whole 'nuther story in itself! Click here for more!

What we care about

Serving, rather than selling: We despise over selling, up selling, hard selling, and, well, pretty much every other kind of selling. (Hence, perhaps, our chronically deferred relationship with profits.) 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 want you to find out for yourself if we're any good. 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: The majority of 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.

For more resources...

Please visit dryeyefoundation.org!