Warby Parker 2010: Selling Glasses You Can't Try On
Situation
It is 2010. Prescription eyewear is a strange, lucrative industry. A pair of glasses routinely costs $300–$500+, yet the materials and manufacturing are cheap. Why the markup? Because a single company, Luxottica, dominates nearly the entire value chain — it manufactures frames, owns major eyewear brands, licenses most of the designer names, and owns the big retail chains and sunglass shops where glasses are sold. When one player controls design, distribution, and retail, prices stay high and nobody undercuts.
Four Wharton students — Neil Blumenthal, David Gilboa, Andrew Hunt, and Jeffrey Raider — see the gap. Their idea: design frames in-house and sell them directly to consumers online for around $95, cutting out the licensing fees and retail markups entirely. Same quality, a fraction of the price.
There's one enormous obstacle. Glasses are the product people most insist on trying on. They sit on your face all day; fit, comfort, and look are everything. Conventional wisdom says you cannot sell them sight-unseen over the internet. That single friction point is what protects the whole in-store model.
The decision moment
It is 2010. The founders must choose how to bring the idea to market.
Three paths:
- Open a store. Sell glasses the way glasses have always been sold — a physical shop where customers browse, try on, and get fitted. Proven and low-risk, but slow, capital-intensive, and it surrenders the cost advantage that made the idea exciting.
- Sell online and kill the try-on problem. Go DTC at ~$95 and attack the one objection head-on with a free Home Try-On program: ship customers several frames to try at home for free, let them return them, then order. Bypass Luxottica's retail moat, own the customer relationship — but bet that people will trust an online eyewear brand.
- Design and wholesale. Create stylish frames but sell them through existing optical retailers. Get distribution without building it — at the cost of accepting the markup chain that makes glasses expensive in the first place.
You are the founders of Warby Parker.
Key datapoints (for reference)
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2010, by four Wharton students |
| Price point | ~$95 per pair (vs. $300–500+ industry norm) |
| Key model | Direct-to-consumer, in-house frame design |
| Friction-killer | Free Home Try-On (several frames shipped to try at home) |
| Social mission | "Buy a pair, give a pair" |
| Launch press | Featured in GQ and Vogue |
| Launch demand | Hit first-year sales target in ~3 weeks; ~20,000-person waitlist |
| Early constraint | Had to temporarily suspend Home Try-On — too much demand |
| Later evolution | Opened physical stores (omnichannel); public listing in 2021 |
Frameworks invoked
- Direct-to-Consumer (DTC). By selling straight to customers, Warby Parker removed the licensing fees and retail markups that inflated prices — capturing the margin and the customer relationship at once.
- Vertical Integration. Designing its own frames meant Warby Parker didn't pay Luxottica's licensing toll. Owning the design end is what made the $95 price structurally possible, not just a temporary discount.
- Disruptive Pricing. A ~$95 price against a $300–500 norm isn't a sale — it's a different cost structure. It reframes the customer's question from "which expensive pair?" to "why have I been overpaying for years?"
- Friction Removal & Customer Experience. The entire model hinged on one obstacle: you can't try glasses online. Home Try-On dissolved it — and turned a liability into a delightful brand experience that also seeded social sharing.
Discussion questions
- The whole business depended on solving one objection — "I can't try them on." How do you identify the single friction point that, if removed, unlocks an entire model?
- Luxottica could have launched a cheap online brand at any time. Why is it hard for a vertically integrated incumbent to undercut its own high-margin retail business?
- Home Try-On is generous and expensive — free shipping both ways on multiple frames. How does that cost compare to traditional customer-acquisition spending, and why might it be a better use of money?
- Warby Parker eventually opened physical stores. Did that betray the DTC thesis, or complete it? When does an online disruptor need brick-and-mortar?
- The "buy a pair, give a pair" mission and the brand voice were central from day one. How much of Warby Parker's success was the model versus the brand — and can you separate them?
The real outcome (revealed at session end)
2010: Warby Parker launches online at ~$95 with free Home Try-On. Press in GQ and Vogue triggers a flood of orders — the company hits its first-year sales target in about three weeks, builds a 20,000-person waitlist, and has to temporarily suspend Home Try-On because demand overwhelms it.
2010s: The DTC eyewear playbook works. Warby Parker scales, then adds physical stores to become omnichannel — using retail not to replace online but to extend the brand. It becomes the template a wave of DTC startups tries to copy.
2021: Warby Parker goes public, valued in the billions — a designer-eyewear brand built by undercutting a near-monopoly.
The lesson: When an incumbent controls a whole value chain, the way in is to integrate vertically and remove the friction the incumbent relies on. Warby Parker's $95 price came from designing its own frames (not a temporary discount), and its online model survived only because Home Try-On dissolved the one objection that protected in-store selling. Find the single blocker, eliminate it, and a "you can't sell that online" market opens up.
Sources
- Knowledge at Wharton, "What Eyewear Startup Warby Parker Sees That Others Don't."
- CNBC, "Warby Parker: How a lost pair of glasses disrupted the eyewear industry" (2019).
- Wharton Mack Institute, "Warby Parker and the Success of Disruptive Innovation."
- Warby Parker company history and S-1 (2021).