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Awards 2021
Verbelee Nielsen-Swanson Founder and Owner Oxford Eyes
BY DIANE SEARS Photography by Julie Fletcher
W
hen Verbelee NielsenSwanson was cleaning out her late mother’s estate a few years ago, she found her own first pair of eyeglasses: blue cat-eye frames she had started wearing in fifth grade. Her mom had held onto them over the years. Nielsen-Swanson smiled about the memory and then donated the glasses — not realizing she’d soon wish she had them back.
Nielsen-Swanson is the founder and owner of Oxford Eyes, a boutique eyewear shop that opened in 2018 in the Lake Ivanhoe district of Orlando. She now counts 22 pairs of eyeglasses and 10 pairs of sunglasses in her personal collection. “Eyewear is an expression of you, and it’s the first thing people notice, the first accessory,” she said. “It serves your interest to get it right. This has been heightened with COVID because most of us are in meetings virtually, and if we’re not then we’re out and about and everyone is wearing a mask. So what you really see is the eyes and the eyewear.”
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Nielsen-Swanson is passionate when she talks about her business. She likes to quip: “A face is like a work of art. It deserves a great frame.” How she came to start this new venture after retiring from a career in health care administration at what is now the AdventHealth hospital system is a tale of several coincidences. To her, it seems like it was just meant to be. She had been a longtime patient at Swanson Sowers Lee & Yager, P.A., an optometry practice her father-in-law, Dr. Reynold Swanson, co-founded on Marks Street in Orlando. As the practice morphed over 50 years and the last of the partners sold to an ophthalmologist, the practice and the optical store connected to it were changing focus. NielsenSwanson stopped by one day to have a pair of eyeglasses adjusted, and she heard the news. She didn’t want to see the shop’s talented optical team split up. Plus, where would she get her eyeglasses? She had an idea. She and her husband, Bob Swanson, had been traveling around the world
as new retirees and had visited optical boutiques that carried unique frames not available in Central Florida.
“That seeded the idea that there was a need and a gap here,” she said. “And of course, this shop had the most amazing team, and the community needed them, with their experience, their passion and their great relationship.” So she hired two opticians and an eyewear specialist from the Marks Street location, and today they help customers choose glasses according to face shape, prescription requirements and personal style. In fact, specialist Lisa Sarles has at least 30 pairs of eyeglasses herself. Nielsen-Swanson has a theory behind that: “You need an eyewear wardrobe. You don’t have one pair of shoes.” Opening and furnishing the shop allowed Nielsen-Swanson to put to work another of her passions: interior design. Named after both an aunt in Alabama and a Southern flower, she had double-
