Who Owns Specsavers?

Specsavers is owned by its founders. Companies House names Doug and Mary Perkins directly — both British, both resident in Guernsey, each recorded with 75% or more of the shares and voting rights. They started the business in 1984 and have never sold it, floated it or taken outside investment. The shops themselves are owned by the opticians who run them. Ownership verified 6 September 2026.

Who owns Specsavers today?

The principal UK company is SPECSAVERS UK LIMITED (01980755), incorporated 21 January 1986. Its two people with significant control are:

• Mr Douglas John David Perkins — British, resident in Guernsey, 75% or more of shares and voting rights, with the right to appoint or remove directors
• Mrs Mary Lesley Perkins — British, resident in Guernsey, on the same terms

Both entries date from 6 April 2016, and both now carry identity verification dates under the new Companies House regime.

Two people each recorded at 75% or more does not mean 150%. Where a couple hold jointly, PSC rules require each to be registered as though holding the whole — the same convention that names both Resnicks on Fiji Water and nine Westons on Wittington elsewhere on this site.

Ultimate parent and corporate structure

There is no parent above the Perkinses. The group is private, has never listed, and has taken no private equity investment — unusual for a business of its size in a sector where most competitors have institutional owners.

The group is administered from Guernsey, where the founders live and where the parent structure sits, with the operating companies registered in England at Whiteley in Hampshire. That is why the UK register names individuals rather than a holding company: the chain does not run through a long series of English entities.

Guernsey companies do not file PSC information at Companies House, so the structure above the UK operating companies is not established here.

Major shareholders or controlling persons

Doug and Mary Perkins founded the business in 1984, having previously built and sold an earlier optical chain. Mary Perkins was the first optometrist to appear on the Sunday Times Rich List, and the couple have remained in control throughout.

Family members have been involved in the business, and succession within the family has been discussed publicly, but no outside shareholder holds a stake and no transfer of control has been filed.

Official records and evidence

Companies House answers the top-level question directly here — two named individuals rather than a holding company or a statement that nobody qualifies — which is rarer than it should be among businesses this large.

What the register does not capture is the more interesting half of Specsavers’ structure, and it needs stating clearly.

Specsavers is a joint venture partnership. Each branch is owned and run by the optometrists and directors who work in it, in partnership with the group — they hold shares in their own store company and take a share of its profits, rather than managing a branch the group owns outright.

So the individual shops appear on Companies House as separate companies with their own directors and their own PSCs, typically naming the local partners. Searching for the store in your town will find a company, and the people named on it will be the opticians who run it — not the Perkinses.

Ownership history and changes

Doug and Mary Perkins opened the first Specsavers stores in 1984, after the deregulation of opticians’ advertising in the UK made a national branded chain viable for the first time.

The business has never changed hands. Its expansion — into hearing care, into Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and into the domiciliary and healthcare services held in the various UK companies — has been funded from profits rather than by selling equity.

The most significant corporate change on the register is administrative: Specsavers UK Holdings Limited (10837649) was incorporated in June 2017 as part of restructuring the British operations, which did not alter who controls the group.

Related companies and brands

The group operates Specsavers Opticians, Specsavers Hearcare, Specsavers Home Visits and its optical superstores and procurement businesses, alongside its overseas operations.

It has no connection to Vision Express, owned by the French group GrandVision and in turn by EssilorLuxottica, or to Boots Opticians, which as this site’s Boots page sets out is now under Sycamore Partners. Those two competitors have institutional owners; Specsavers has two.