Alejandro Betancourt López in Spain’s €3 Billion Eyewear Trade

Spaniards spent €3,035 million at optical retailers in 2025, up 3.6% from the year before, according to the DBK sector observatory at Informa. Sunglasses rose to 14% of that total and were the segment with the liveliest sales.

Alejandro Betancourt López’s Hawkers competes for that spending from Elche, with frames priced well below the premium labels. Francisco Pérez, then head of business development, told Modaes in 2015 that the good years for the two largest eyewear groups were over. When the brand was three years old, its founders said nobody had been selling sunglasses under €70 before they showed up.

A Market Run by a Few Chains

Spain had about 9,800 optical points of sale at the end of 2025, a count that keeps slipping as small independent shops close. More than 6,000 of them, or 61.4%, belong to buying groups, the purchasing cooperatives that let independent opticians negotiate with suppliers as a bloc, and roughly 3,400 sit inside chains. Five operators held a combined 48.7% of the market, and the top ten passed 70%.

Chains grew faster than the sector as a whole in 2025, according to the same data. Ophthalmic lenses made up about 45% of sales, frames about 20% and contact lens products 16%. The international eyewear houses sit above the Spanish chains. Luxottica owns Ray-Ban, Prada and Burberry eyewear and the Sunglass Hut stores, Safilo holds Carrera and Dior, and Marcolin carries Montblanc, Diesel and Tom Ford. Luxottica alone booked €7,652.3 million in revenue and €642.6 million in profit in 2014.

Where Alejandro Betancourt López’s €30 Pair Fits

Hawkers priced its glasses at €25 to €40 in its early years and had sold more than 1.6 million pairs across about 50 markets by the spring of 2016. Exports were already 40% of revenue. That price band put the brand closer to the fashion aisle than to the optician’s counter, and the group that owned it, Saldum Ventures, also held the Wolfnoir and Northweek eyewear labels.

Hawkers Eyewear, the optical division of Alejandro Betancourt López’s brand, ran 15 stores in Spain and Portugal by October 2022, and management named optics, through franchises or its own network, as a growth line. Hawkers was operating in more than 80 countries by then, with about half of its online sales coming from abroad.

Design still comes first in how Alejandro Betancourt, who chairs Saldum, judges a product. “People eat through the eye,” he said when asked in 2023 whether a brand needs visual appeal to launch. Alejandro Betancourt López took Hawkers’ presidency in November 2016, the month the board seat held by co-founder Alejandro Moreno passed to him.