Fast Company praises hyper-hipster eyewear-retailer Warby Parker for its fanatical focus on execution and brand:
By designing and manufacturing their own frames and selling directly to consumers over the Internet, they’re able to charge as little as $95 per frame, a fraction of what a similarly nice pair of glasses would cost at a typical optical shop. That price also includes prescription lenses, shipping, and a donation to a not-for-profit such as VisionSpring, where Blumenthal previously served as director.
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Last July, just four years after their launch, Blumenthal and Gilboa announced that they had distributed their millionth pair of glasses, up from 500,000 just a year before. According to a person familiar with the company’s finances, annual revenue is “well over” $100 million. The fashion press has been impressed and so have investors, who have put in more than $115 million to date, which Blumenthal and Gilboa are investing in an expanded product line that includes progressive lenses and, of course, a fast-growing retail presence.
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“A lot of subtleties go into a brand,” says Sasha Tulchin, the company’s director of creative services, who came to Warby by way of Tory Burch and Cole Haan. Tulchin invokes the dinner-guest metaphor as well, imagining the Warby Parker brand as “quick-witted, but wears her intelligence lightly. Looks sharp without planning to. Takes a dare. Always offers to help with the dishes.” Tulchin goes on to cover Warby Parker’s preferences in graphic design, color palette, and serif and sans serif fonts (Utopia and Proxima Nova). “The Warby Parker voice is witty, intelligent, informative, playful, delightful. We are not trite, pretentious, sarcastic, long-winded,” she says. “Every time we create a piece of copy, every time we create something new for marketing — every time it’s either in our office or externally projected — we do it with these filters.”
This carefully cultivated persona is at least in part Blumenthal himself, who still reads (and rereads) every written word that his company puts out into the world. “This is five years in, a 500-person company, and the CEO is approving every marketing message the company puts out,” Lerer says with awe. “Every CEO does that in the early days. You do it with 10 people, and if you’re good you do it with 25 people. You don’t do that when you have 500 people. Neil still does it.”
Behold our new aristocracy:
Blumenthal has long been the company’s public face, but it was Gilboa who first landed upon the idea that became Warby Parker. Born in Sweden to a pair of doctors, Gilboa is even-tempered, quiet, and analytical, speaking with an uninflected precision that can seem at once removed and intense. As a teenager growing up in San Diego, Gilboa tells me, he’d often accompany his father to the hospital, hoping to learn as much as he could about various medical specialties. “I was 100% convinced I was going to be a doctor, and I was just trying to decide which kind of doctor,” he recalls.
While he was a premed student at the University of California, Berkeley, Gilboa learned about HMOs, which convinced him that he might want to look for other options. He wound up in business, first at the consultancy Bain & Company and then the boutique investment bank Allen & Co., before returning to school to enroll simultaneously at Wharton and in a biomedical engineering master’s degree program at the University of Pennsylvania’s engineering school. (“He’s the smart one,” Blumenthal says, chuckling, as Gilboa tells his story.)
A few weeks before starting school, Gilboa left a pair of $700 Prada frames in an airplane seat-back pocket. “I’d just bought the iPhone for $200 and it did all these magical things that people wouldn’t have believed even a few years earlier,” he recalls. “Meanwhile, a pair of glasses: The technology has been around for 800 years. It didn’t make sense that I was going to have to pay that much for a new pair of glasses.” He complained about this to Andy Hunt, his study-group partner, who was, like Gilboa, a former finance guy and a glasses wearer. “We started talking about why glasses were so expensive,” Gilboa continues. “Then we learned a little bit about Luxottica.”
Founded in 1961, the Milan-based company takes in about $9 billion a year, running the eyewear business for most major fashion houses, including Armani, Chanel, Prada, and Ralph Lauren. Luxottica markets its own frames too: Oakley, Oliver Peoples, Persol, and Ray-Ban are all Luxottica brands. Consumers find these frames for sale at LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, and Sunglass Hut, all of which are (you guessed it) Luxottica subsidiaries. Luxottica also happens to own one of the top vision-insurance companies, Eye-Med, which, if you have coverage from Aetna or Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, is your carrier.
Luxottica is in fact so powerful in the $65-billion-per-year eyewear industry that Gilboa and Hunt likely would have moved on to other ideas had they not heard about a kid in their MBA classes who knew more than pretty much anyone else in the world about how to work outside of the traditional eyeglass-supply chains. “There’s always a moment of serendipity in any startup,” Hunt says. “For us, it was meeting Neil. The company couldn’t have existed without him.” (The fourth cofounder, Jeffrey Raider, happened to be sitting in the computer lab next to Blumenthal when Gilboa and Hunt broached the idea. He worked at an private equity firm after Wharton and eventually cofounded Harry’s, the Warby Parker of men’s grooming.)
In person, Blumenthal cuts an unusual figure. He has a tendency to speak in the looping manner of Woody Allen dialogue, and he’s physically goofy with a geeky affect that is heightened by the (nonprescription) glasses he wears every day. Yet he is remarkably light-footed in social settings. The son of a tax consultant and a nurse, he grew up in Greenwich Village — a savvy New York City kid with an entrepreneurial streak. As an 8-year-old, Blumenthal persuaded his parents to order him an As-Seen-on-TV food dehydrator and attempted to start a dried-fruits stand on Mercer Street. By high school, he was taking advantage of the city’s lax attitude toward underage drinking and moonlighting as a club promoter. “You partied for free, you got paid — and you got to deliver this amazing service to your friends,” he says, flashing a sheepish smile. “So maybe that was my first triple-bottom-line business.” (Since 2011, Warby has been a certified B Corporation, considering its environmental and social impact in addition to its profitability.)
In college at Tufts, Blumenthal double-majored in international relations and history and dreamed of becoming secretary of state. He took the foreign-service exam and did well, but not well enough and, a few months after graduation, and wound up with a fellowship in El Salvador, where he helped shape VisionSpring’s now-famous market-based approach to philanthropy: Rather than simply give away free eyeglasses, the organization supplies frames to entrepreneurs to sell to their neighbors. (The strategy has won numerous accolades, including three Fast Company Social Capitalist awards, and has been adopted by organizations such as Toms Shoes and Matt Damon’s Water.org.) “That’s when the entrepreneurial thinking kicked in for me,” Blumenthal recalls. “I was trying to understand how we could get entrepreneurs to spend more time selling glasses, doing margin analysis, going over to China to try to source glasses at lower cost.” In other words, Blumenthal’s experience was a perfect match for Gilboa’s idea. When Warby Parker launched, it included a buy one, give one feature through a partnership with VisionSpring.
Although Blumenthal technically oversees Warby Parker’s stores and marketing while Gilboa tackles customer service and technology, the duo are, in fact, jointly responsible for all major decisions. The arrangement allows them to be more hands-on than might be possible in a typical high-growth startup, but it also means that both men must be constantly in sync, a feat that is particularly impressive given that they are, in some sense, polar opposites. “Dave and Neil are left brain, right brain,” says Hunt, who is now a venture capitalist with Highland Capital Partners.