Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know
Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.
About 15 years ago, when four MBA students at Wharton asked their professor, Adam Grant, to invest in their then-novel proposal to start an online prescription eyewear company, he took a hard pass.
“My first reaction was: that’s ridiculous,” he told CNBC in 2020. “You can’t buy glasses over the internet. You have to go get your eyes tested. And then you have to try them on. This is not going to work.”
But the company, Warby Parker, which launched in 2010, certainly did work, and by 2013 it was expanding into brick-and-mortar retail, opening a store in Manhattan’s trendy SoHo district. That footprint has grown ever since, and its locations surged from 204 in May 2023 (per an SEC filing) to 273 stores today.
Spectacle-ular foot traffic: Even if Warby Parker did crack the code on selling glasses online, it appears to have a keen eye for selling them offline, too. Visits to its stores in the second quarter were up 25.5% YoY, compared to a 6.8% increase in the broader eyewear category, according to Placer.ai data. And rather than its brisk expansion draining its average per-store visits, average per-store visits grew 6.8% YoY, apace with the industry average growth of 7%.
Warby Parker’s store locations are well situated for the coveted college market, according to what Placer.ai calls the “captured market,” a geographic measure of the population that visits stores. College students make up 4.2% of the brand’s stores’ captured market, compared to 1.2% for stores in the broader eyewear category.
See suite: And how’s all that store expansion working out for Warby Parker? In Q1, revenues were up 16.3% YoY, to $200 million. It will announce Q2 results on August 8.