Neil Blumenthal. Andrew White/WIRED
The first thing to know is that I’m wearing a pair of Warby Parker glasses as I write this. My bias is as plain as the frames on my face. I like the company I’m writing about.
I like that Warby Parker’s glasses have a distinctive style—a little bit mid-century, a little bit nerdy. I like how the four-year-old startup ships five pairs of glasses at a time for free to try on at home. I like how the glasses mostly cost less than $100. And I like how their customer service seems to be conducted by real people, not robots or, even worse, people trained to act like robots. Through a combination of good product design, a deep commitment to user experience, and supply-chain smarts, Warby Parker has managed in four years to build a company that in my experience as a customer is doing just about everything right. Which is why I worry that it can’t last. After all, if not sucking was a sure way to build a sustainable business, why don’t more try it?
Case in point: On Wednesday, Warby Parker announced a milestone involving another good thing it does. For every pair of glasses sold, the company donates another pair to VisionSpring, a charity that trains people in low-income communities around the world to conduct eye exams and set up businesses selling glasses for a few bucks a piece. Warby says that, as of now, it has donated one million pairs of glasses. “When we launched Warby Parker, we thought we were going to have to beg our parents to go online and buy one or two pairs a day to keep us in business,” co-founder and co-CEO Neil Blumenthal told WIRED. “So this wildly exceeds our expectations.”
Making the Math Work
As easy as it is to snark about corporate do-gooderism, I have a hard time faulting Warby for what it’s doing—consider the alternative of not giving away any glasses. VisionSpring, which Blumenthal directed before he started Warby, seems to take a particularly non-patronizing approach of trying to figure out what glasses people might actually want to wear, instead of just shipping them rich countries’ cast-offs. “Fashion matters no matter where you live, no matter how much money you have,” Blumenthal says. (Gold wire and gun metal frames are popular in India and Bangladesh, he says, while Central America goes for more New York-Los Angeles styles.) My question is more around how a startup that already isn’t charging very much for its product can afford shaving even more off its bottom line by giving away a percentage of every sale. Can any startup survive like this? Or is doing good bad for business?
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