Celebrity Name: Emma Willis
Brand Name: Vision Express
Deal Type: Brand Ambassador + Style Edit
Collection Drop: April 9, 2026
Impact: Amplifies Vision Express’s eye-health messaging while positioning Willis as a go-to face for accessible fashion and lifestyle endorsements
- Emma Willis was named brand ambassador for Vision Express in December 2025, fronting the optical retailer’s Step Out With Confidence campaign, her first partnership with the brand.
- On April 9, 2026, Willis launched Emma’s Edit, a nine-piece curated eyewear collection featuring optical frames and sunglasses, available in-store and online.
- The campaign is anchored in Vision Express consumer research showing nearly three in five Brits have previously felt anxious about a major life event because they couldn’t see clearly, making eye health the emotional core of the partnership.
- For Vision Express, this follows a legacy of high-profile British ambassadors. The brand previously worked with Sir Trevor McDonald and Dame Julie Walters on its celebrated Vision. Taken Seriously campaign.
British TV presenter Emma Willis has officially joined forces with optical retailer Vision Express as its new brand ambassador, fronting the brand’s Step Out With Confidence campaign. The partnership, announced in December 2025, marks her first collaboration with the brand.
Willis, a much-loved figure in the UK who has graced screens and radios for almost three decades, embodies the Vision Express ‘Step Out With Confidence’ ethos.
On April 9, she dropped Emma’s Edit, a spring-ready nine-piece collection of optical frames and sunglasses, curated directly with the Vision Express team.
For Vision Express, Willis is the latest in a line of trusted British faces, having previously partnered with Sir Trevor McDonald and Dame Julie Walters for earlier campaigns. Willis brings fresh, style-forward energy to a brand now leaning heavily into eyewear as a confidence tool rather than just a health necessity.
Just as Tracee Ellis Ross teamed up with Emmanuelle Khanh on an eyewear collaboration blending personal style with brand identity, Willis’s Emma’s Edit follows that same blueprint, a celebrity-curated capsule designed to feel genuinely personal.
On the personal brand front, Willis has been active across multiple partnerships. Beyond Vision Express, she has worked with Absolute Collagen and Marks & Spencer, and has been spotted wearing ME+EM extensively across her social media presence.
On the TV front, she co-hosted Netflix’s Love Is Blind: UK in 2023 and co-presented Swiped: The School That Banned Smartphones in 2024, keeping her profile highly visible across both broadcast and streaming audiences.
This is a smart play from Vision Express, similar to how Cynthia Erivo’s partnership with Brooks Running for a global brand campaign used a celebrity’s credibility and personal narrative to amplify a brand’s core message.
Takeaways
This partnership is a textbook example of a brand finding its ambassador in someone who actually lives the product. Emma Willis isn’t just a famous face holding a pair of frames, she’s a daily glasses wearer who has publicly connected her confidence to her eyewear. That kind of authenticity is increasingly what cuts through in today’s sceptical media landscape.
Vision Express is also making a smart pivot: rather than selling glasses as a medical necessity, they’re selling them as a style decision, and the Emma’s Edit collection with its nine curated frames is the physical proof point.
The consumer data they’ve released alongside the campaign (63% of Brits anxious about life events due to poor vision, 78% believing glasses improve appearance) gives the partnership genuine cultural weight beyond just a product launch.
With Emma Willis now fronting a full curated collection, not just a campaign, does this signal Vision Express is repositioning itself as a lifestyle brand rather than a pure optician? Will more eyewear brands lean into “real-life” TV talent rather than high-fashion faces?
