Mollie Tavel Kaback was quite literally born into optometry. For more than 84 years, her family has owned and operated local optometry business, Dr. Tavel Family Eyecare.
Now, in her new venture, Alternate View, she’s reimagining it.
Alternate View is a boutique eye care center that’s a one-stop shop for your whole face. In addition to eye exams and buying eyewear, it has various facial aesthetics offerings and eyewear styling.
Tavel Kaback worked for her family business for a number of years, and also did her own thing, living and working out of state, before finding her way back to Indiana in 2019, ready to bring to life the idea she’d kept in the back of her head for years.
“Twenty-nineteen was really the point at which I was like, “If I’m going to do this, I should come home and do this,” Mollie Tavel Kaback, Founder and CEO of Alternate View. “This dream of Alternate View was there at the time, but we had a good old-fashioned pandemic, so it took a back seat.”
Her dream gained momentum again in 2022, and in January 2026, Alternate View opened to Carmel residents and beyond, aiming to provide everyone who walked through its doors a spa-like experience.
“It should be enjoyable, it should be like shopping, it should feel like a spa and something that you look forward to,” Tavel Kaback said. “It does not have to be the clinical and medical environment that you often experience in eye care. That vision for bringing all of that together really took shape and came to life in Alternate View. It has been my dream to be able to bring this to life, and it’s here, and it’s working.”
More Than Just Eye Exams
Compared to traditional optometry offices, Alternate View offers more than just eye exams; it also offers high-end eyewear styling and various facial aesthetic services tailored to each person’s needs.
“You can come to Alternate View for comprehensive eye care and annual eye exams,” Tavel Kaback said. “You can come in with a prescription. You can come in with no prescription and just buy sunglasses or readers if you’d like. The doctor portion of this is comprehensive care tailored to you. We are building a personalized relationship between our eye care provider and you. So whatever your challenges are, that’s what we want to hear.”
When Tavel Kaback first started dreaming up Alternate View, she employed the wealth of knowledge and experience she’d gained through Dr. Tavel Eyecare. Still, there were roadblocks she had to overcome throughout the process.
“I think, as with any new venture, you don’t know what you don’t know,” she said. “I definitely have learned a lot of things the hard way, and creating something new, there’s no template for the series of challenges that I have had to overcome and figure out in real time. I think knowing optics, knowing frame styling, knowing dry eye treatment — those are all things that have really helped me.”
Another challenge she faced was making enough changes and implementing enough features to really make Alternate View different from what’s already out there.
“I have plenty of experience spinning the wheel of optometry and eye wear, but opening the rest of it together in a single place,” she said. “That took a lot of learning and a lot of hard lessons to figure out exactly what was needed and what tweaks were needed to make this work, but feel unique and different from what’s already out there.”
On the flip side, one of her earliest successes has been “the incredible people who have come through our doors.
“From day one, every single client that we have worked with has been a wonderful friend,” said Tavel Kaback. “We have been extremely lucky, and we feel very grateful that every person we have worked with, we want to see again.
To promote a spa-like experience, guests are welcomed by the boutique’s purple-colored walls and rows of different-colored eyeglasses. When guests check in, there’s a bar menu for them to choose from.
“We want you to come in to chat with us and enjoy your coffee or enjoy your wine and tell us about your life or your vacation or whatever,” she said. “That is the goal. We want you to want to be here. That has been a huge win since day one.”
Facial Aesthetics
Eye care isn’t typically described as luxurious—or even enjoyable—but Tavel Kaback is working to change that. With Alternate View, she’s introducing a fresh take on optometry that prioritizes personalization, aesthetics, and experience just as much as vision. She designed it to be more than just a place where patients come for eye exams.
Alternate View currently offers a range of services in addition to eye care, such as personalized eyewear styling and facial aesthetics.
Its facial aesthetics offerings include IPL, which brighten and even your skin tone by reducing sun damage, redness, and pigmented skin through Intense Pulsed Light Therapy; radiofrequency facial (RF), a treatment that stimulates collagen production through RF energy; and RF microneedling, a treatment that addresses specific skin concerns like scars or pigmentation.
Alternate View also offers neurotoxins and fillers, but uses a “modern, minimal and intentional approach” to soften fine lines without disrupting your unique features.
“We’ll correct your vision, we’ll help you with your skin’s signs of aging, dryness, watery eyes, allergies, you name it,” she said. “On the facial aesthetics side, it’s really focused on skin quality. So, if there is an area on your face that you wish was tighter or you have a sun spot or freckling, that sort of thing, we’ll work with you to put together a plan to address it.”
If they cannot help you eliminate or reduce a facial aesthetic you want, Alternate View can help with other options to help you feel more confident in the skin that you have.
“The idea is that not everyone needs any type of facial aesthetic; you want to feel beautiful in the body you have, and you want to feel like you are putting your best face forward,” she said. “So, we want to be able to help you do that in every realm of how you present, from the neck up. It translates into neurotoxins, botox, fillers, bio stimulators, IPL, radio frequency, microneedling, etc.”
Tavel Kaback also redefined the process of picking out a pair of eyewear. Rather than having guests pick out their own eyewear, they get to know the person they’re styling that day, and curate a special selection of glasses that will work with their face shape, colors, and personal style.
“We really flipped people’s traditional approach to eyewear on its head,” she said. “We have you walk in, we select eyewear that we know will look good on you, that reflects how you presented in our office, that reflects some questions that we have asked you while checking in, and we’ll curate a collection for you to try.”
Alternate View is located at 750 Veterans Way, Suite 228, in Carmel and accepts most insurance plans. A full list of services and appointment booking is available online at www.alternateview.com.
About Samantha Kupiainen
Samantha Kupiainen is a regular Indy Maven contributor and classic four-eyed (and proud) geek.
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