Harvey and Kenny Moscot’s great grandfather, Hyman Moscot, emigrated to the U.S. from Eastern Europe in 1899 and started selling ready-made eyeglasses from a pushcart on Orchard Street in New York City’s famed Lower East Side. He opened Moscot’s first retail space at 94 Rivington Street in 1915.
While the brothers are the fourth generation of Moscot’s to sell eyewear in New York, Harvey is actually the first optometrist in the family. All the rest were opticians and their great grandfather, a “merchant.”
Hyman’s son, Sol, and grandson, Joel, continued moving the business forward, and today, Harvey continues that tradition by expanding its optometric services and Kenny by extending the brand throughout the world.
The First OD in the Family
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| The fourth generation and the first optometrist in the Moscot optical family, Harvey was among the top ten students in his optometry class of 1986. |
Working in the Moscot stores for much of his life, Harvey was well versed on the opticianry side, adjusting frames and interacting with patients, but both his academic prowess and his experience in the store led him to become an optometrist. “I didn’t want to be dependent on an optometrist,” he said, because over the years he had observed that “when the optometrist didn’t show up, the business would come to a halt.”
Harvey was graduated in 1986 Magna Cum Laude from Boston University and was among the top ten students in his optometry school. “Going to optometry school enlightened me that it was much more than just providing good vision,” he said, so he navigated what he calls a “seismic shift” in optometry in the ’80s and was graduated from optometry school “way more qualified than just giving prescriptions and doing refractions.”
After graduation and subsequent to the departure of the “old guard refracting optometrist,” who had been with the practice for close to 40 years, since Harvey was born in 1960, “I was able to really create the evolution I had always wanted to achieve,” he said. “We can do everything but surgery. We’re very accessible to a younger generation of patients. If you solve their problem it doesn’t matter if you are an OD or an MD.”
For example, Moscot is in the forefront of treating computer vision syndrome, having just recently completed a study on the condition sponsored by Essilor and utilizing the PRIO Vision Tester, Essilor Anti-Fatigue™ lens, and Essilor Computer™ lens.
Celebrity Neighborhood
Today, Moscot operates two storefront locations in New York City, one at the corner of 14th Street and Sixth Avenue and the other at the corner of Orchard and Delancey Streets, while also managing a strong retail e-commerce presence and a global eyewear brand that’s proven successful with trendsetters and celebrities such as Johnny Depp, Jeff Goldblum, Renée Zellweger, Josh Hartnett, Moby, and January Jones, among many others. Local celebrity neighbors and patients include Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick. Harvey said they’ve done eyewear for hundreds of celebrities as well as for movies, and he describes his most representative eyewear client as the “independent
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Today, Moscot provides eyecare and eyewear through two storefront locations in New York City.
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creative confident individual.”
Popular throughout the world, the eyewear line is based on frames reproduced from the Moscot archives that they had been selling for 50 years. Harvey describes them as “classics, analogous to wing-tipped shoes or a white t-shirt…standard stable items that never went out of style.”
He credits his family’s success over four generations to “a commitment to the Moscot experience, the way we take care of our customers, our patients. It’s about their experience, never about the one-time customer but about the lifelong relationship.”
Other changes include a rebranding in 2004, spearheaded by Harvey’s brother and business partner, Kenny, an optician with a finance background from Boston University, who is the “branding and marketing side of the company.” Harvey is president of Moscot Eyecare and vice president of Moscot Eyewear, while Kenny is president of Moscot Eyewear and vice president of Moscot Eyecare. After their father retired in 2003, “we really set out to do what we’ve always envisioned,” said Harvey.
Giving Back to the Community
Beyond treating patients and selling eyewear, Moscot provides its neighbors and customers with a weekly music night and gives back to the community (while also generating goodwill) through its Mobileyes Foundation. The weekly music event is an outgrowth of the talent of some of the employees as well as Harvey himself. “I’m a songwriter, and a lot of our employees are musicians,” said Harvey, “so we let musicians come in and play in our store on Saturday afternoons.”
Located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in the neighborhood where the likes of Bob Dylan, Madonna, Debby Harry, The Ramones, and countless others made a name for themselves, Moscot is perfectly situated to provide a venue for local musical talent.
The practice also sponsors fundraising events for its Mobileyes Foundation, which donates examinations and glasses every three months to help ex-cons get their lives back together through the John Doe Fund and to underprivileged children through the Boys’ Club of New York. “After 100 years of eyecare, we felt it was time to give back,” said Harvey.
Over the years, Moscot has become so much a part of the fabric of New York City that it can even sell its own vintage products such as historic photographs and moleskin notebooks through “Moscot Furnishings.”
What’s next for Moscot? The fourth-generation family business is looking to expand in the U.S., taking its legacy beyond New York City and into the future. After all, the Moscot family has surely found lingering success in New York, and if they can make it there…
John Sailer is Senior Editor of First Vision Media Group. Contact feedback@visioncareventure.com with comments and/or suggestions for future topics.
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