Framing the future of eyecare with Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa of Warby Parker - podcast episode cover

Framing the future of eyecare with Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa of Warby Parker

Dec 14, 202339 minEp. 579
--:--
--:--
Listen in podcast apps:
Metacast
Spotify
Youtube
RSS

Episode description

Warby Parker co-CEOs Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa broke their scrappy startup into the eyewear industry in 2010—putting legacy manufacturers on notice by offering stylish glasses at much lower prices. But having since gone public and facing pressure from digital landlords and changing technology, Warby Parker now faces a new set of challenges and unknowns...

This week on How I Built This Lab, Neil and Dave share insights on leading a public for-profit company with a social mission. Plus, why brick and mortar is essential to the business, despite starting as a direct-to-consumer brand, and how artificial intelligence will change eyecare as we know it.

Also, check out Warby Parker’s founding story told by Neil and Dave in December 2016.




This episode was produced by Sam Paulson with music by Ramtin Arablouei.

It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Kerry Thompson. Our audio engineer was Patrick Murray.

You can follow HIBT on X & Instagram, and email us at [email protected].

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to How I Built This Early and Add Free Right Now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Audible is the home of storytelling and it lets you enjoy all of your audio entertainment in one app. You'll always find the best of what you love or something new to discover. As an Audible member, you can choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog, including the latest best sellers and new releases. In fact,

I've been really into thrillers and true crime lately and I just got back from a long car trip where I was listening to the latest zombie fallout book, Bridging the Gap. And I swear I had to keep checking the backseat for any glowing eyes as I drove home on that deserted highway. In fact, on so many of my journeys, Audible is there for me with comedy, best sellers, history, exclusive originals and more. New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash built or text built.

We've all been there. Maybe we used one or two misleading words in a shared document and then the whole team spends a lot of wasted time trying to get on the same page, but we don't need to make those mistakes. Grammarly is a trusted AI writing partner that saves your company from miscommunication and all of the wasted time and money that goes with it. I spend a lot of time writing, I write scripts, emails, speeches, proposals, you name it. And Grammarly helps me find the right tone.

It does so much more than correct grammar. It's almost like a trusted writing partner. And when every word your team writes is clear, concise and on brand, everything gets better. Teams that communicate better with Grammarly report 52% less time spent writing sales emails and 66% less time spent editing marketing content. Join 70,000 teams who trust Grammarly to work faster and hit their goals while keeping their data secure. Learn more at Grammarly.com.

You only get one chance to go public and the stakes are high. Deloitte's free IPO readiness tool will help you grade your current state of readiness. Less than 10% of companies using Deloitte's free tool discover their ready for an IPO. While the IPO market can be unpredictable, your company's readiness plan doesn't have to be.

Don't miss your IPO window. Being ready starts with getting ready. With Deloitte's free and easy to use IPO self-assessed tool, you can gauge your IPO readiness and receive tailored insights on nine areas of focus in less than 30 minutes. Visit Deloitte.com slash US slash HIBT and launch your IPO journey today. Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Ross. So I think it's fair to say that Warby Parker has transformed the way Americans buy glasses.

When the company launched back in 2010, the industry was dominated by just a few legacy manufacturers and getting a pair of glasses for under 100 bucks was virtually unheard of. The co-founder is Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa were actually some of the first guests we had on How I Built This back in 2016. And if you haven't heard that episode, it's worth scrolling all the way through the podcast queue. It's towards the bottom. To check it out, it is such an inspiring story.

Anyway, fast forward to today. And Warby Parker is no longer the scrappy start-up it was back then. It's a publicly traded company with more than 200 stores across the US and Canada and more than 3000 employees. But getting to that point hasn't exactly been smooth sailing. The social media landscape that helped Warby Parker reach so many customers in the 2010s has completely changed.

And competitors have entered the space, offering similarly sleek and stylish glasses and even lower prices. And maybe the biggest change of all, artificial intelligence, which Neil and Dave says, is one of the main things that keeps them up at night today. But we'll get there. From the beginning, Neil and Dave have led the company as co-CEOs, an arrangement that's still in place today that they say helps them more effectively run their company.

Having a partner makes the highs a bit higher. We get to celebrate together when things are going well and it makes the lows a bit higher. Or you have someone who can help pick you up when things are not on track. And there hasn't been a situation where we can't align and find a path forward. And so, you have to feel very lucky to be on this journey together.

Being a founder or entrepreneur can often be very lonely. And so having a partner has been incredibly beneficial for both kind of mental health and for achieving better outcomes. But we also recognize that it doesn't make sense for both of us to be involved in every meeting and every conversation. And so we do try to divide and conquer where we can sometimes that means that one of us is speaking out of conference while the other is managing some internal meetings.

And then we each have our own direct reports. So every department, every executive, only reports into one of us. And that allows us to kind of spend more time in those parts of the business. Then Neil and I are constantly updating each other. Probably a couple of dozen times a day if there's new information that's coming up.

And then at least on a monthly basis will each join the one on ones that our partner has with his direct reports. And so we're kind of constantly in the loop on all information that's going on the company. And if we need to substitute for one another, we're informed and we can provide continuity that also enables us to be efficient in managing the day to day aspects of the business.

What happens if somebody says, Oh, I spoke to Dave about this or vice versa. I spoke to Neil about this. Like I'm sure that happens and has happened a lot over the last few years. It does sometimes happens and we joke around that we don't want to get in a situation where you know somebody gets one answer from mom and then goes to dad.

We've now have a lot of practice as someone's asking for something that requires a little bit of thought. We don't feel an incredible amount of urgency to quickly commit to something. And we'll say, Hey, we'll get back to you. Right. One of our friends is a former Navy seal on his head of a special operations group and he taught us, Hey, when you're faced with a decision, often like the first decision you have to make is how much time do you have to make this decision?

Right. If you're in the Navy seals, often you have split seconds to make decisions in business. You have often a lot of decisions. That means that you can't be slow, right? Because a competitive environment is fierce and you need to be making quick informed decisions. But you know, a couple hours a day often doesn't make a difference. So it leads to a better outcome because you're more thoughtful and you might, you know, ask one more question, right? That leads to a better outcome.

All right. So there've been a lot of changes at Warby Parker. Since we last spoke, you've got stores, more competitors. You've gone public and we'll talk a little bit about all those things. But let's just talk first about the competitive landscape and the challenge of breaking through.

And when you've got all these new competitors in the space, have you responded? You know, for example, on price, like if a competitor is all of a sudden offering something that looks similar, does it affect how you guys price your products? We think the best brands and the best companies really understand the market and you have to be constantly evaluating pricing across the board. And of course, because of the internet, right?

And it's made pricing very transparent. We've always believed in providing exceptional value and we define that as charging a fraction. So literally a fourth or a fifth of what other people charge.

So we launched with $95 glasses and we still sell $95 glasses today. Now we've introduced some additional frames that have more complex construction that costs more to manufacture like our precision progressive offering, which is a top-align progressive lens, generally for people over the age of 45 that have a complicated prescription.

Those start at $395, whereas they would cost well over $1,000 elsewhere. So we're always looking at providing exceptional value. And then also we don't foresee a lot of new entrants challenging us in the short term. And if we look at the overall market, 88% of glasses are sold in bricks and mortar. So it's still only 12% online penetration, which is really low. So if we want to really scale and tackle this market, we've got to be focused on that, you know, 88 to 90%.

And those are the big optical chains that have 1,000 plus locations. There's also a long, long tail of independent optical shops and ophthaletric practices that don't have the capital or the technological resources to invest in a customer experience like we do.

So right over the past few years, we've launched the first of its kind, true to scale virtual trion. So we were innovative when we launched with a home trion, right? Select 5 pairs of glasses. We shipped it to you free of cost. We have 5 days to try it on at home.

Well, now, you know, once people had iPhones in their hands with the true depth camera, we were able to create a virtual trion that was great and helpful because it actually put a digital image of the frames on your face, true to scale. You can move your face around and really get a sense for how they look and feel. Similarly, we launched a virtual vision test that enabled folks to do a simple vision test from their home. So they could renew their contacts or glasses prescriptions.

Right. These are things that keep us a step ahead of everyone in the category, whether it's a new entrance or, you know, a legacy retailer that's been around for decades. So all right, let's talk about the brand impact because I have had so many conversations on the show where people have referred to the Warby Parker model or the Tom's model or, you know, you guys were really pioneers and D to see and also in this one to one giving model.

You know, I've been to Warby Parker stores. I've gone on the website and the one to one model doesn't seem like it's emphasized as much. I know you still do it, right? You still give one pair of glasses away for when you sell, but I was surprised that it's not like front and center of how you position your business. So can you talk a little bit about that for a moment?

Sure, I think we've learned and we learned this very early on. In fact, actually, when we were working on the business plan is what's most important to customers? And when they're buying glasses, what's most important is the glasses look good on their face? Then how much do they cost? And then is it good quality and is it good service?

I'm lastly, you know, is there are social ethos behind the brand and is my purchase sort of helping and serving others? So with that knowledge, when we're meeting new customers for the first time, we lead with fashion, right glasses are a core part of someone's identity. We want them to look great.

Then we tell them that's only $95, right, including all the bills and whistles. And frankly, it's not until usually after they purchase that they even learn that for every pair of glasses we sell, we distribute one to someone in need. Yeah. I wonder whether consumers, I mean, you kind of addressed this a little bit, but I want to dig into it a little bit more.

Is there evidence as far as you guys know that consumers really care or choose a brand because of its social mission? Like, it doesn't move the needle that much. So what we found is that the biggest impact is in our ability to attract and retain some of the most talented, passionate, driven people in the world who want to work for a mission driven organization.

And so that's where we tend to see kind of the biggest benefit from a business standpoint. It's about attracting good people to work for you more than selling more glasses. Yeah, we do think that it creates a positive halo for the brand. We think that engenders goodwill probably creates more opportunity for people to talk about the brand when someone comments on how good they look in their glasses.

And so we do think that there are some tangential benefits from a customer standpoint, but we don't believe that it dramatically influences how people shop for glasses. As Neil said, what people care most about is, you know, do these glasses look good on my face? Is the service great? Is the value in the price great? Yeah, but aside from, you know, also retaining or attracting talent, like why? Like, when you ask yourselves, hey, this is why we do that.

Like, this is why we spend a considerable amount of our capital resources on getting glasses away. How do you explain to yourselves? It's motivating to us. And when we were starting the business, we were trying to figure out, hey, what's the type of place where we're going to want to come to work every day? Where are we going to want to give our blood sweat and tears when we're tired in the morning?

You know, what's going to motivate us not to hit the snooze button, but to wake up quickly and get to the office. And it's doing good in the world. And we were frankly shocked that there's a billion people on the planet that don't have access to glasses, right? That's crazy. And that requires real strategy, real resources to tackle problem of that scale.

And we've seen that actually as we've grown as a business, right? We started primarily just providing glasses overseas in places like India and Bangladesh. And as we've scaled and have gotten more expertise and resources, we've then been able to go into schools across the US and convince school districts and city governments to partner with us to hire eye doctors. And we're actually right here in New York City. We're providing glasses to every kindergartner and first grader that needs them.

So we partner with the city. We have doctors that go in and provide eye exams to those that need it. And then we lay out a bunch of frames that our team has designed and the kids have agency. And they choose what pair of glasses they want. We make them. They get them back in a couple of weeks. And the glasses look good on their faces. And they use them and they perform better in school. And it's awesome. So is there a part of the team that's only focused on this part of what you guys do?

So we do have a social innovation team that's focused on figuring out how we can have as much impact as possible across stakeholders. And then we've actually found that it's incredibly motivating to our core team members in functional areas of the business to be able to spend part of their week on these efforts around getting glasses to students in need in schools and in low income areas across the US.

And so our eyewear design team they actually design these frames for kids are merchandising team goes through kind of a full merchandising process like we would for any collection that we'd be selling to customers are supply chain team in our optical labs.

They're cutting lenses in certain frames and shipping them off to schools and incorporating that into kind of part of their actual functional job duties. They're able to connect the work that they're doing to the impact that we're having and again really motivates and attracts talent that wants to feel like their work means something.

We're going to take a quick break but when we come back how Warby Parker is reaching new customers and why brick and mortar is anything with dead stay with us I'm Guy Roz and you're listening to how I built this lab. Here on our show we bring you tales of the long sometimes really hard road to building a successful company. Of course no two entrepreneurs journeys are exactly the same but themes do emerge one there's no way they can do it alone.

Another is how incredibly important it is for companies to keep their teams connected no matter where they are in the world are sponsor at last year knows this better than anyone there team has spent over 20 years creating software like Jira and confluence to make collaboration of any size and across any distance possible because at last you believe the best ideas are impossible alone.

And look there will always be challenges with distributed work our team here at how I built this might not be huge we do a lot with a small group of hard working people but we really understand the importance of staying organized and having visibility across the team especially when we're all working remotely having the right collaboration products can make all the difference when you need to move quickly work efficiently and make informed decisions with their evidence based approach at last year has redefined collaboration.

And if you're looking for solutions for your team at last year's sweet of software is the foundation to help make the way you work that much more seamless no matter where you are your team can plan meticulously with Jira and create a knowledge based with confluence turning ideas into action and brainstorming into breakthroughs a world where distributed teams sink effortlessly

or the touch of innovation streamlines every project that's not a dream it's a reality with Atlassian whether your team is spread across the country or even the globe delivering greatness is impossible alone learn more at Atlassian dot com that's ATL a SS I a N dot com Atlassian. We've all been there maybe we used one or two misleading words in a share document and then the whole team spends a lot of wasted time trying to get on the same page but we don't need to make those mistakes.

Grammarly is a trusted a writing partner that saves your company for miscommunication and all the wasted time and money that goes with it I spend a lot of time writing a right scripts emails speeches proposals you name it and grammarly helps me find the right tone.

It does so much more than correct grammar it's almost like a trusted writing partner and when every word your team writes is clear concise and on brand everything gets better teams that communicate better with grammarly report 52% less time spent writing sales emails and 66% less time spent editing marketing content join 70,000 teams who trust grammarly to work faster and hit their goals while keeping their data

secure learn more at grammarly dot com on our podcast we love to highlight businesses that are doing things a better way so that you can live a better life that's why when I found a mint mobile I had to share mint mobile ditched retail stores and all those overhead costs and instead sells their phone plans online and passes those savings on to you for a limited time they're passing on even more savings with a new customer offer that cuts all

mint mobile plans to 15 dollars a month when you purchase a three month plan that's unlimited talk text and data for 15 dollars a month before I switched to mint mobile I was paying a lot more money every month for my old wireless plan and the service was wasn't that great but with mint mobile every plan comes with unlimited talk and text plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network to get this new customer offer and your new three month unlimited wireless

plan for just 15 bucks a month go to mint mobile dot com slash built that's mint mobile dot com slash built cut your wireless build to 15 bucks a month at

mint mobile dot com slash built additional taxes fees and restrictions apply cement mobile for details hi guy it's young from Amsterdam I've been listening to your show for years now and I haven't moved by so many of the stories so it's hard to just pick one that is why I wanted to highlight one key inside and learn from your show and it is about how building a business is not only about hard work with a portion of luck but also about the magic that often arises

from connecting with the people your cross paths with so from that perspective your show gave me the confidence to get out there and build the business and it also gave me the patience to wait to come across the right co funder but thank you so much for helping me make the right decisions and for highlighting the magic of connecting with people you meet along the way

if you want to share your favorite episode of how I built this record a short voice memo on your phone telling us your name where you're from what your favorite episode is and why a lot like the voice memo just heard an email it to us at h i b t at id dot wonderie dot com and we'll share your favorites right here in the ad breaks a few episodes and thanks so much we love you guys you're the best and now back to the show welcome back to how I built this lab so when

Warby Parker first launched it was a direct to consumer brand that only sold its classes online but now Warby Parker has over 200 stores across the u s with plans to open even more was that more of a marketing play you know that if you get stores or brick and mortar store out there people become more aware of your brand or was it more complicated than that so at the end of this year we'll have 240 stores across the u s and Canada

wow and our journey into retail was one where it started by just listening to our customers and trying to solve their problems and we came to appreciate that having convenient physical locations enables us to make shopping experience convenient for our customers enables us to hire eye doctors and offer i exams enables us to have opticians where we can offer adjustments but but it's more expensive than just doing a

D to C brand there's certainly real costs that are associated with opening stores from paying rent and building out the stores and hiring teams but the costs of operating e commerce business have also increased dramatically over the 13 years since we came into existence where you essentially have landlords in the form of Google and meta

and when you open stores those stores serve as billboards and are able to attract customers on their own and we find that the economics for us are a pretty comparable regardless of a channel that that customers are shopping and yeah it's interesting you mentioned this that I think it's a very apt analogy Google meta are the new landlords because you want to reach customers you're forced to pay money to those

platforms help me understand your kind of approach to that world I mean is that where for the foreseeable future maybe even beyond that marketing will be that it is going to be dominated by these two companies.

So we believe that all brands you know can benefit from those platforms they're very efficient in getting in front of the right audiences but they're charging more and more for that opportunity you can't just rely on paid media and advertising and by far the number one source of new customers for us is our existing customers and if we're able to treat our customers well for able to give them a great

experience they tell other people about the brand and that's really the number one marketing tool for us. Yeah I remember walking through downtown San Francisco in 2017 with somebody who said to me break and mortar retail is dead it's over it's all moving online and your company was an example of that and then more people said COVID is the death now of breaking mortar retail no one's going to come back to it.

Do you think people were wrong because you're growing I mean you've got 230 plus stores so clearly you're bullish on having physical locations why. Yeah I think people were way wrong and that doesn't mean that e-commerce penetration is not increasing in most retail categories but it's not increasing at the rate that would make bricks and mortar sort of disappear and then similarly retail in general right consumption is increasing so the whole pie is increasing as well.

Listen they're over 48,000 optical shops in the U.S. that's a lot and the vast majority of Americans prefer to go into a physical space to shop for glasses to get their eye exam to talk to an expert and that's not changing any time soon. Yeah I think probably the most powerful aspect of our business model is that we have a direct relationship with our customers and we're constantly collecting feedback and data around

the customer experience and where there's friction and where we're exceeding expectations and where there are problems for us to solve and what was very clear when we launched and we were scaling our e-commerce business was that you know people loved our product they love the experience they love to do a home try on and try on frames.

It was really frustrating to them where the aspects outside of the Warby Parker journey where they had to get a new prescription and we didn't have any doctors to send them to so they had to go to a non-warby Parker doctor and it was kind of a disjointed customer journey for them and in particular optometries interesting it's the only part of human medicine where a doctor can prescribe something to their patient and then sell them that product and make margin on it.

Yeah if you go to an MD and they write you prescription for a drug like lipitor you go to a third party pharmacy the doctor is not making money on that optometry it is different and so there are all these economic conflicts where someone would try to order for us they'd send us their prescription and be expired.

We'd say here some local places where you can get an i exam they would go to update their prescription and then there'd be a kind of pretty high pressure environment for them to purchase glasses from that location and we found kind of increase in complaints from our customers that you know they they would love a more convenient way where they could complete their entire customer journey at Warby Parker and as we started opening stores across the country we hired doctors for some of those stores and we found.

That customers loved being able to have one stop where they could get their prescription by glasses and then also get contacts from us and so that's really where we've been spending a lot of our time making sure that we can reduce friction for customers and patients and make the entire customer journey as easy as possible.

It's interesting something about the brick and mortar store and how it helps you is there evidence that you have gathered that shows that it's like reinforcing system where the store increases awareness people might go online and go to the store like I the analogy I make is when we started putting this podcast on the radio six or seven years ago it actually grew our podcast audience because even the radio is a legacy medium and it's you know the audiences are declining.

It still does have an impact people might then go and subscribe to the show on their iPhone or whatever out of the use it right and so is that more or less what what happens with the stores that's exactly right what we found is that if we're going into a new market and we open up that first store there is some e-commerce cannibalization for a short period of time the way to think of it is there's a certain size pizza.

Yeah, in that market the store comes there's a bunch of people who have been buying online who actually prefer to go in store so once that stores there they start going there but having that store there increases awareness it increases the size of the pie so while you might have now a two thirds bricks and mortar one third online split over the long run the point is that the market is so much bigger now because now people know of war be.

Parker they trust war be Parker they're ready to purchase from more. Because of that store being there the other thing that's happened in the last few years is our business has changed pretty dramatically so in addition to opening up you know 240 stores we move towards a holistic vision care offering and what we mean by that is an addition to selling glasses right we have i doctors and provide exams we have contact lenses and so folks sort of engage with those products and

services both online and offline so someone might come to our store get an i exam by a pair of glasses maybe make an initial purchase of contacts but then do all the reordering online going forward so where is we always had an omni channel experience now because of our increased product and service offering there's even more reasons to go back and forth between physical and digital.

You guys decide to take the company public in 2021 I believe right is that right 2021 yes September 2021 yeah and we we take a lot of pride that we went public through a direct listing not as a spec not as a spec not even as an IPO right we didn't need any capital so we didn't want to raise capital that would dilute shareholders and we thought that going public through a direct

listing we were only the eighth or ninth company that to ever do that so you don't have to do a road show or any of that stuff because you were like we're just going public yeah we're literally press a button well I mean there was a ton of work that that what it's right but one of the advantages to doing a direct listing is that you don't have a lockups so our shareholders and our long time investors and our employees could sell their stock day one so when we went out at $54 I got a people did and they made a lot of money

and that was incredibly well deserved and that's a source of pride for us because we also have seen so many companies that gone public and then they have a six month lockup and the share prices writing high and then literally a day before the lockup expires a day before investors and employees can sell right the stock drops so there was a moment where a lot of our long time investors and our employees were able to take advantage of that.

We were able to take advantage of that very hot market and those very high share prices was that the primary motivation for going public yeah there were several reasons that causes to go public and I think the advent of the direct listing made it more appealing to us we didn't need capital we had plenty of capital on our balance sheet and so the concept of a traditional IPO where you end up taking on a lot of delusion that didn't really make sense to us but

when this new avenue where you could become public without raising any capital emerged and it became much more interesting to us and it did give us the opportunity to provide liquidity to some of our longest tenured employees so this was an opportunity where our earliest employees could buy a condo for themselves or for their families and that was a big motivation.

We also recognize that as a private company you're limited in the number of shareholders that you're able to have and we would often hear from our customers that email me and Neil directly some of our biggest fans and they tell us how much they love the parker and they asked if there's a way that they could become a shareholder and when we're private we can enable that to happen that as a public company that the cap table is much more democratic and so that was another motivating factor.

The third is that our mission is to create vision for all and we think of that both literally and figuratively where we literally want to make sure that every human being on the planet who needs classes has access to them but we also want to prove that you can build a great for profit business that does good in the world without charging a premium for it and hopefully inspire a lot of other companies, a lot of other entrepreneurs to think along the same lines and going public puts us on a bigger stage.

There's a bigger spotlight on us our finances are also under a bigger spotlight and we want to prove that this isn't a great business and it can withstand all the scrutiny that comes along with being a public company and we do believe that our impact over time will be bigger as a result of that decision.

We can take another quick break but when we come back Dave and Neil discuss the future of War Reparker and how AI will change I care stay with us Guy Roz and you're listening to how I built this lab. The spirit of performance is what defines Acura and now it's electric introducing the ZDX Acura's most powerful SUV yet crafted using the same formula that brought them electrified supercars and multiple IMSA championships.

The ZDX has track tested performance that packs an energy all its own unlock the energy and order yours at Acura.com. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all in one website platform for building your brand engaging your customers and growing your business online. So if you're running a business like the founders on this show then you'll love some of Squarespace's features whether you sell physical goods digital content or services.

Squarespace has the tools you need to start selling online including lots of payment options for customers at checkout as well as easy client invoicing. Squarespace also makes email campaigns super easy with customizable email templates for converting subscribers into loyal customers. And Squarespace has tons of analytics so you know where all your site visits and sales are coming from.

So check out squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com slash built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Welcome back to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Razz. Here's more from my conversation with Warby Parker co-founders Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa.

Now that you're you know you're a mature business you're not a scrapy startup anymore. There's a lot more bureaucracy and you put you in a competitive disadvantage right that's why there's Airbnb because Marriott and Hilton and Hayette they let couldn't figure this out.

And so Airbnb comes in and same same with you guys right you know you figured out a model that disrupted a bigger industry. Now you're a big player with competitors who are you know understandably nipping at your heels so how do you keep that startup mentality going if it's possible at all.

You know are we as nimble as when we had 40 people working out of one room and everybody knew what each other were doing so we didn't have to have meetings. Obviously not like that was a special time but we now have a level of resources and expertise that we couldn't even dream of right in those early days. And that enables us to do things at a scale and a level of frankly thoughtfulness that we couldn't do back then that we think leads to more an impact.

So one of the phrases that you'll hear people around the company often talk about a scale with integrity. So scaling with integrity from our perspective means that we're being thoughtful we're moving quickly that we're making investments in the future.

Right so we're not just making short term decisions and that's actually when we want public something that we were worried about was was would short term thinking in fact the the organization and what we found is that it's not that short term thinking has clouded out long term thinking but going public has actually created some more urgency which is fantastic right that quarterly reporting it's okay if something was going to be done a few weeks later let's get it done.

So we're still having a lot of fun we're still you know able to innovate there definitely times where we just run up to a few folks in every company has you know 15 or 20 people that just you can give them a prompt and they will run through walls to make stuff happen and we have that too and do those folks sometimes ruffle some edges because maybe they broke a process.

Yeah and that's completely okay and we make it okay within our culture. I've mentioned this in the show before it's from an interview I did with Ken Chenult formerly from American Express many years ago and basically says become the business that is going to put you out of business and with companies like Zeni and 1 800 contacts there you know competitors you guys are obviously have done things and are doing things to stay ahead of the curve like I exams on site I exams.

And contact lenses and virtual try on and also virtual exams like there are a lot of things you're doing. Do you sort of think about that like what do we have to do to become the business that they could potentially put us out of business. Absolutely well what's funny about the two examples that you mentioned is that they've been around over 20 years each.

So you know I think because people aren't as familiar with them as our brand they think that they're the upstart you're the upstart yeah that have you know surpass them in a lot of areas so yes we are looking at everybody whether there are folks that have been around 20 years or new folks and can we learn from them. Is it a good motivator that will sometimes use for the team like hey how did these guys get this done are they moving faster than we are.

And what we're more scared about is students that grew up in a digital era that are thinking about how to build a next generation company using the latest advances in AI in ways that may sneak up on us.

So actually just yesterday we had a hackathon where we had a bunch of our team members spend three days just looking at different ways that we could use generative AI to innovate and add new features and make sure that you know if there's a new startup disruptive approach to our category that it's coming from within Warby Parker and that we're able to cultivate that and build that.

That's what keeps you up at night yeah absolutely and we're constantly thinking about where are we hearing that there's friction and problems from our customers how can we address those if those problems persist someone will solve them and it should be us. I mean your brand was built on arguably one of the most disruptive dissemination engines in the history of our species social media.

Now we're entering this new phase artificial intelligence a lot to be worried about how do you think that the coming technology particularly around artificial intelligence will change our relationship with eyeglasses and with what you guys do as a business.

Yeah we believe the consumer experiences can be orders of magnitude more personalized and customized for every individual so based on the measurements and the contours of your face will recommend the best products for you and kind of generate that digital experience on the fly and so it should result in a much faster more personalized experience that results in better matching of products and services to every individual user.

And then even think about sort of the healthcare implications right as we push farther and farther into i exams and i care the old adage the eyes are the windows to your soul the eyes are the windows to your health and we can learn so much through imaging and then we can use a eyes to make diagnosis eventually and you know helped better triage customers not just within sort of the world.

I care about for primary health care and and beyond I mean we believe that the AI revolution will be more impactful than the internet revolution right this is on the scale of the industrial revolution and and perhaps even even bigger.

I get a lot of questions from corporate leaders around how to navigate the very complex world that we live in the social dynamics politics a lot of companies made statements around George Floyd and have taken public stances around political issues like abortion this is not new but it's new or right like in the past companies just didn't weigh in in general.

Now it's more common but it also is tricky and treacherous because it means that when you don't say something about one thing people ask what you said about this other thing. So how do you think about your role in speaking out around issues.

We have a framework by which we make decisions and it's often about impact on our stakeholders our employees and our customers and then also our ability to have impact on a particular issue so as we thought about our racial equity strategy for example roughly 2% of optometrist in America are black.

We hire a lot of optometrist can we work with optometry schools can we work with partners to raise awareness of the profession of optometry in black communities and increase the number of black optometry students so that way we can have better representation within the field of optometry and perhaps better health outcomes right that that's how we sort of think about some of these issues.

Making bold proclamations or performative statements can sometimes not lead to desired impact and may actually lead to disruption and distraction so it's something that we think a lot about.

I think when we spoke many years ago you talked about creating an enduring brand building a hundred year company so is that still something that you aspire to and because I started to change my views on this I start as myself doesn't matter if you're 100 year brand is a matter if you're the next Coca-Cola or for you can accomplish a lot in 20 years and fold up and move on but is that important to you guys to have a legacy brand that out lives you.

We think so when we're asked what are you trying to do here we're trying to provide vision to the world we're trying to provide the tools to enable people to see we're trying to build a brand that inspires that people love and when you ask somebody on the street whether five favorite brands we want to be named there we want to be named alongside apple and Nike.

We want that to endure now you only get that if you deserve it so we need to deliver in the days the weeks the months a years ahead to be a brand worth loving and a hundred years is you know it's an arbitrary timeline but it is representative of the fact that we 13 and a half years in we feel like we're still just getting started here and we have less than one percent market share.

In a massive category we have distributed 15 million pairs of glasses to people in need but there's still a billion people around the globe who need access to glasses and there's just so much work to do and the bigger we get the more opportunities we uncover and we're just excited about all the new opportunities and challenges ahead as we build out our I care practice and higher hundreds of I doctors as we innovate and telemedicine as we see.

Medicine as we scale our contact lens business as we continue to lead in how brands can evolve in a omnichannel world and so we're as excited as ever by the challenges ahead and still feel like we're in the top of that first inning and so if the top of the first inning is 13 and a half years long then maybe the whole game is over a hundred years and we really just want to make sure that we're delivering as much impact as possible. Awesome guys thanks so much. Thank you. Yeah, this is fun.

That's Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa co-founders and co-CEOs of Warby Parker. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show and as always it's free. This episode was produced by Sam Paulson with music composed by Routine Arablewe. He was edited by John Isabella with research help from Carrie Thompson.

Our audio engineer was Patrick Murray. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Carla Estevez, Chris Macini, Jasey Howard, Malia Aguadello, Niva Grant and Catherine Cipher. I'm Guy Raaz and you've been listening to how I built this lab. If you like how I built this you can listen early and add free right now by joining Wundery Plus in the Wundery app or on Apple podcasts.

Prime members can listen add free on Amazon music before you go tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wundery.com slash survey. In the climate ravaged year of 2072 the city of purist dances a miraculous green haven a geoengineered paradise that protects fortunate residents from the global catastrophes of heat domes fires floods and droughts.

Demetria Lopez heads up purist public relations tirelessly promoting the city's idyllic image but when she stumbles upon a dark secret that if exposed would be the downfall of purist existence she must decide who and what. She is willing to protect from Wundery the makers of academy and doctor death the last city stars actors Rayas Seahorn, Jeannie Toronto and Maurice Sterling.

The last city on the Wundery app or wherever you get your podcasts you can binge all episodes of the last city early and add free right now by joining Wundery Plus.

This transcript was generated by Metacast using AI and may contain inaccuracies. Learn more about transcripts.
For the best experience, listen in Metacast app for iOS or Android
Open in Metacast