NANYANG Optical goes back quite a way: It was started in the 1950s by my father as a lens grinding company. I would help out after school by collecting prescriptions from the opticians. In the early 1960s, Singapore was a bustling and growing city. The time spent at the optical shops waiting for opticians to hand me the prescriptions showed that business was good, so we went down the retail route.

But that wasn't enough. Having been around for a relatively long time, our biggest takeaway from the mid-80s recession, Asian financial crisis and Sars was to develop our own line of products - environmentally-friendly eyewear.

Of course, we learnt all the other hard lessons too. As we developed the Nanyang Optical and Alexis Eyewear Boutique in Singapore, as well as pursuing joint ventures in Beijing and Jakarta, our business was still affected during each downturn and we experienced slow growth.

But we took a prudent approach in managing our cashflow and also placed emphasis on supplier relationships by repaying debt in a timely manner. We also watched company expenses and, at the same time, tried not to lose focus on the service excellence and product knowledge.

Our problem, however, was that the eyewear industry is flooded with many 'me-too' products and there is no distincton between optical retail stores. I reckoned, however, that green products were emotional products which is why we created the world's first eyewear made of recycled materials.

So we decided to stand out from the rest by developing green products as we believed these would be 'emotional products'. After years of retail activity, we took the path less travelled and developed a design centre and R&D facility to shape the future of spectacles.

All our local Singapore outlets advocate the eco-friendly concept and provide full circle recycling system where used spectacles, contact lens cases and solution bottles are collected. We work with the local plants to collect these items for recycling. The recycled and recyclable materials are in turn used to manufacture eco-friendly eyewear, Linkskin. This is available exclusively in our Nanyang Optical and Alexis Eyewear Boutique.

In this recession, we're trying to fight the storm by introducing new mid-priced design concept eyewear, and we'll be focusing on strengthening our regional distribution built up from past recessions. We now distribute our own eyewear brands in Europe, America and Asia - and some have won international design awards like the Red Dot Design Award and recently, the iF Material Award Gold.

So if you ask what is my advice to SMEs on what to do during this recession? I'd say re-look your product line and avoid 'me-too' products. Think out of the box and continually invent new concepts.