INSIGHTS Remembering a Most Influential Woman By Andrew Karp Monday, July 18, 2016 12:00 AM Bonnie Sericko, who died May 24 at age 99, was never profiled among Vision Monday’s Most Influential Women. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t influential. In fact, Sericko influenced not just a company, product category or profession, but our entire industry. Sericko entered the optical business in 1934 when she took a job with one of American Optical’s labs. While working there, she met her husband-to-be, Joe Sericko. During World War II, Bonnie worked at an optical dispensary while Joe managed an optical lab making war supplies. Wives of enlisted men received $50 a month for expenses. She saved the money or sent it to Joe, who was a skilled poker player and he routinely sent her back hundreds of dollars in winnings. They used the savings to purchase Columbian Bifocal (CB) Optical Lab in 1946. In the late ‘50s, Bonnie began to challenge the anti-competitive tactics that large optical companies were using to undercut small independent labs. Together with Gordon Keane, Sr., she initiated a case against American Optical and Bausch & Lomb, collecting evidence of price fixing to prove the large labs were driving out smaller competitors. The evidence became the cornerstone of a federal trial that eventually led to the breakup of AO’s and B&L’s vast lab networks. The breakup prompted many skilled employees to start their own labs. These independents were an integral part of the optical supply chain until Essilor and other lens companies began to acquire them in the mid-’90s as part of a vertical integration that is still underway. Bonnie was an active manager at CB Optical into her 70s. She championed a 100 percent company-funded profit sharing plan for employees, nearly unheard of in the 1960s. And she was integral in computerizing labs in the 1970s. In 2005, the OLA inducted her into the Optical Pioneers Hall of Fame. An influential woman indeed.akarp@jobson.com