At Noon Eyewear, Goh Shi Song isn’t trying to out scale the giants

When Goh Shi Song talks about Noon Eyewear, he does so without embellishment. “People say you run your own business to escape the nine-to-five, but it becomes nine-to-nine, or nine-to-twelve,” he says, remembering the early years when he and his two siblings shouldered both the retail floor and the back-end grind.

Noon began not as an inheritance of wealth but of connections — the fragile goodwill carried over from their parents’ shop, Everfaith Optics. From there, the siblings built something of their own, an experiment that became a philosophy: how to keep a business small and still make it matter.

Goh admits he never loved optics in the first place. “The interest was never in optical, to be honest. That was always something I struggled with,” he says. What drew him in was not the science of lenses but the theatre around them — the service, the rituals, the rhythm of business itself. Noon became less about eyewear and more about encounters, where a pair of glasses served as proof of care. 

In that, Noon echoes the ethos of AVATR 11, the newly launched electric SUV that frames luxury as an intelligent presence rather than spectacle. Both suggest that the real product is not the object but the experience it creates, and that endurance is found not in scale but in intention.

But for Goh, maintaining that intention meant confronting an uncomfortable truth about the cost of care — both for customers and himself.

Running a business with siblings is both intimate and fraught with friction. Tensions rose with the long hours; burnout crept in. “For me, burnout is when you can no longer prioritise anything outside of work,” Goh explains. The haze was constant, the sense of being perpetually behind, paralysed by things beyond his control.

His solution was deceptively simple: close the shop one extra day each week. His siblings baulked at the potential losses, but he argued for experimentation — they could always open again if it failed.

The risk worked. That extra day became space to breathe, to fix the back-end processes that had long been neglected, and in that breathing room, Noon rediscovered its ability to evolve. It was a reminder that progress need not always look like acceleration. AVATR’s “Future Elegance” rests on the same principle — velocity tempered by pause, performance balanced by intelligent design.

Redefining value

The shift also sharpened Goh’s definition of success. He once thought it meant happy customers until a mentor challenged him: Business is about cash flow. “Now that I’ve educated myself a little bit more on that, my measure of success is essentially: What’s our revenue, and what profit margin can we get per month? To be blunt, as a business, to sustain the business, you need to be profitable.”

That pragmatism did not erase Noon’s ethos of service but clarified it. Noon does not compete on price or volume. “If you’re looking for the cheapest place to make glasses, I don’t recommend our shop. Never,” Goh insists.

Instead, the business attracts people who value care, who understand that what they buy is less a product than a relationship. The question then becomes: How do you preserve something so personal when the world constantly asks you to make it bigger?

Expansion, though tempting, is not the measure of ambition here. “We provide the best service possible because we’re the owners. But how do you train an employee to be even just 50 per cent of that?” Goh asks. Scaling risks dilution, and dilution threatens the very intimacy Noon stands on.

Better, he argues, to stay precise, to hold the brand’s integrity intact. This philosophy finds resonance in AVATR’s design: the 11 is neither a brute SUV nor pure supercar but a deliberate hybrid, defined not by size or quantity but by proportion, balance, and intent.

Noon embodies a similar stance — its strength is not in how far it stretches, but in how closely it holds its form.

Customers as community

At Noon, customers are treated like friends, a conviviality best evidenced by a flourishing appointment list that grows by the day. “The feeling we want them to get,” Goh lets on, “is almost like they’re coming in to chit-chat with a friend, get their eyes tested, and at the end of the day leave knowing their eyes are well taken care of.”

Some of the older loyalists from his parents’ generation drifted away when the business moved to an appointment-only system. He is unapologetic. “We can’t please everybody.” What remains is a community of people who stay by choice, who refer friends by word of mouth, sustaining the shop not through volume but through trust.

By the close of our conversation, Goh is clear-eyed about the strains and trade-offs. “It’s not easy running a small business,” he reflects. Yet what emerges is not resignation but discipline.

Noon persists because it has chosen a different scale of ambition — one measured not by how big it grows but by how carefully it preserves its craft. To resist the push of scale, to refuse the hollowing of intimacy, is, if Goh is to be believed, its own form of success.