Husband and wife, Brendan and Helen O'Brien, have launched Ireland's first prescription-based website, www.getlenses.com. The contact lens website is expected to shake up the retail contact lens market by offering more competitive prices to consumers because of the low transaction costs associated with online trade.

The site allows users to purchase daily, fortnightly monthly and coloured contact lenses, and have them delivered to their door within 24 hours of order confirmation.

Mr and Mrs O'Brien, who are both qualified optometrists, say they are planning substantial expansion into the business-to-business market, and they are currently negotiating with some well-known companies here to expand their product offering.

The site will target the 4 per cent of Irish people currently wearing contact lenses, and there are longer-term plans to capture a portion of the UK market, where 6 per cent of the population wears contact lenses.

"The UK and Ireland contact lens market is worth over half a billion pounds sterling," says Mr O'Brien. "This is an opportunity for a small company to compete against the huge UK multiples that have already taken 30 per cent of the Irish independent opticians' market."

Pictured above: Ms Stephanie O'Connell models a pair of shamrock-style contact lenses