Replacing Catalog Optics Everyday at a Lower Cost.

Since our founding in 2003, Supply Chain Optics has provided thousands of generic equivalents of standard catalog optical parts to North American manufacturers of lasers, analytical instruments and laboratory equipment. Most of our customers started out by engineering their products using optical parts sourced from commercial optics catalogs.

Catalogs are convenient for engineering when developing new products, or for getting a part quickly. But those conveniently “off the shelf” catalog optics are actually priced VERY high in order to cover the catalog’s costs of marketing, inventory and, most of all, the support infrastructure for taking “onesie-twosie” orders.

We still encourage you to use catalog optics in engineering, development and prototyping, as often as possible. But, once your design moves into production, let us drastically lower your costs using catalog equivalents.

The other benefit of the catalogs is that they will always be there as a back-up production, in case there is a huge uptick in demand, for example. We mainly provide generics that can always be bought out of the catalog later on again if desired, not custom-designs that would lock you in. In other words, our customers get off-the-shelf convenience without off-the-scale pricing.