Peeq Pro believes that in twenty years every person will “peeq” (wash) their eyelids as frequently as they brush their teeth. The world of screens and computers is devastating our eyes and eyelids - causing dry eye disease to skyrocket from 3 million patients in 2000 to 40 million patients today. Essentially, dry eye follows smart phone adoption about 7-10 years later. This is having a significant impact on people’s eye health, particularly causing discomfort and sometimes vision loss. Like oral hygiene in the early 1900s, ocular hygiene is going to be a defining category of healthcare and beauty in the 21st century.
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People do not realize how important good eyelid hygiene is. With the advent of cell phone use, our eyelids, their glands, and our eyes are experiencing a variety of new physiological consequences to “normal” behavior. This is leading to discomfort, unhealthy looking eyes, and long-term vision and eye health problems. But, society does not yet realize the widespread degradation (see Case Study and outside Well + Good Article).
Peeq Pro is primed to dominate the ocular hygiene industry as the issues are starting to present themselves. Since 2000, dry eye disease in the United States has spiked form 3 million sufferers to 40 million sufferers. Dry eye can cause discomfort, redness, etc. But, it can also cause vision loss and corneal ulcers. It can be debilitating. But it can also be a slow degradation of quality of life. One common problem is sitting in a room with the air conditioning running. Imagine not being able to sit in a room with a fan or air conditioner during a Texas summer. This is one key reason that dry eye sufferers also experience significantly higher rates of depression and loneliness (almost 2x the normal population).
Started by two eye doctors, Peeq is being built to help with the at-home hygiene that is associated with improvements to dry eye disease. But, the current numbers around compliance are shocking. A patient who is diagnosed with dry eye syndrome or its precursor meibomian gland dysfunction (MGD) comply with one month of eye washing at only .22% based on our patient surveys without Peeq Pro’s intervention. With Peeq Pro’s suite of interventions (products, services, and software), the rate of compliance goes up to about 13%. We believe that we can get that number close to 30% using existing technologies and being focused on habit creation. With our existing customers (about 120 offices, 300 doctors), that represents more than 278,000 patients who are already in the Peeq network with hundreds joining through their optometrists every month.
We believe that dry eye represents a severe change that is coming to America and will cause radical behavioral change with or without Peeq. We simply want to be on the front end as the dominant market player and to soften the consequences of screen use.
Eyelids are gross. People don’t clean them. This is causing discomfort and deteriorating eye health, beauty challenges, and vision loss. The industry is growing rapidly as people look at screens - causing a blink rate of 30% of normal. Think about what happens when you do anything 30% of normal - your muscles deteriorate, your systems work poorly, etc. This is happening to our eyes and eyelids, but people are not aware of the problem until they have already experienced non-recoverable loss. It is insidious and complicated by how eye care is handled (glasses before health). By the mid 2030s, there are projected to be 8 billion smart phones in operation. The lagging data suggests that by 2040, more than half the people on earth will have dry eye or its precursor. This from a disease that was essentially only post-menopausal women in 2000. The coming dry eye health crisis is real, and it is imminent.