Our history. A small Italian company with the standards of a large industry.
Born to fill a gap. Grown to keep it filled.
Qualimed was founded in 2011 with a specific goal: to manufacture coloured contact lenses that would be, without compromise, both certified medical devices and objects of superior aesthetic quality. The market at the time offered products with outdated iris designs, artificial colours and clinical standards inadequate for responsible daily wear. There was room to do better, and we decided to fill it.
The Desìo brand, from the Latin desiderium, meaning desire, was created to give a name to this idea: that a coloured lens could be at once a certified medical device and a desirable cosmetic accessory. Today the trademark is registered in over 150 countries and distributed through a selected network of professional partners in more than 50 international markets.
Between the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023 Qualimed inaugurated its new Gallarate headquarters: a 3,000 sqm facility with cleanroom, integrated R&D and Industry 4.0 production lines. An investment of over 3 million euros that consolidates production capacity and the quality structure for the years ahead. Growth remains steady, in volumes and in geographical expansion.
Tereza Uhrova
Founder & CEO
Everything, in life as between people, begins with a gaze. It was from this conviction that Qualimed was born in 2011, and with it Desìo. Desìo is the word Italian poetry has always used for desire, and it captures the brand's intention in full: the desire to make the gaze even more irresistible.
With Desìo I set out to change the contact lens market, bringing a premium, luxury brand into the sector for the first time. And with it an idea that went against the grain back then: the beauty of the gaze has no gender, coloured lenses are for everyone, not only for women. We were among the first to address men too, from that very first year.
I love beauty in what is most essential about it: symmetry, a classical beauty that is never extreme, where taking away matters more than adding. The same care I give to every detail I give to people: one by one, I gathered around me the finest professionals in the sector. Today I lead an international, multilingual organisation where regulatory and clinical expertise, design, marketing and sales, customer care and the precision of those who make every single lens all work on the same product, with the same dedication, because to me no role counts more than another.
In the end, everything at Qualimed begins with and returns to a single detail: the gaze.
The size of an SME, the method of a certified industry.
People
A team of 30+ professionals with expertise spanning European regulatory affairs, optical design, quality control and international business development. The size is that of an SME, the method that of a certified industry.
Certified quality
ISO 9001:2015, ISO 13485:2016, CE-MDR marking, FDA Cleared. Every lens is optically inspected before sterile packaging. Our standards do not depend on the batch or the destination market: they are the same for every unit produced.
Vision
Dioptric range up to −13.00 D in the coloured version. Toric lenses for astigmatism up to −3.00 D of cylinder. New-generation materials for wearers with an altered tear film. Not the minimum needed to stay on the market, but the maximum achievable with the technology available.
Figures that speak for us.
- Current production
- 4.5 M lenses/year
- Theoretical production capacity
- 12 M lenses/year
- Available colours
- 34
- Countries of distribution
- 50+
- Registered in
- 150+ countries