6 March 2014
NEW YORK: Warby Parker, the eyewear retailer, is disrupting
the eyewear category through challenging industry norms in areas such as
product selection, pricing and distribution.
Neil Blumenthal, Warby Parker's ceo/co-founder, told
delegates at BRITE '14 – an event run by the Center on Global Brand Leadership
at Columbia Business School – its goal has been to solve a variety of problems.
"We just love glasses. But we didn't love the process
of buying glasses: we thought that was something you could just do
better," he said. (For more, including how Warby Parker tackled doubts
about buying glasses online, read Warc's exclusive report: How Warby Parker
disrupted the eyewear category.)
One issue Warby Parker observed when surveying the scene was
that the existing experience often proved disappointing in terms of store
layout.
The huge number of near-identical products available also
served to paralyse consumer decision-making, rather than enhancing perceptions
of choice.
"When you walk into a typical optical shop, there are
700 to 1,000 different options. It's overwhelming," said Blumenthal.
"And when you typically look to buy glasses now, they're really expensive.
"It didn't make sense to us that glasses cost as much
as an iPhone; just intuitively, that didn't resonate … For us, the problem was
that buying glasses was too expensive and not fun."
Back in 2009/10, when the firm was starting out, it was
equally clear that the web was an underutilised channel, yielding less than 1%
of category sales.
Warby Parker aimed to exploit this gap by creating an
ecommerce site for its deliberately small – but stylish – collection of
glasses.
"Category after category was moving online,"
Blumenthal said. "So we thought, 'Of course: eyewear as a category is
going to eventually be sold online. Whoever does that is going to make a tonne
of money.'"
Unsurprisingly for an established sector with a long
purchase cycle, the company faced an extremely powerful market leader in the
form of Luxottica, which owns several leading brands and makes others under
licence.
Luxottica also runs thousands of stores across the US under
several different banners. That has not stopped Warby Parker moving beyond its
digital origins, as it has opened branded stores in New York, Los Angeles and
Boston.
Data sourced from Warc
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