Q&A With This Year's Most Innovative Company: Warby Parker
Join us for a live chat with Warby Parker’s co-CEOs Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa. The event will begin at 11:30 a.m. EST on Thursday, February 26th.
Five years ago, Neil Blumenthal and David Gilboa launched Warby Parker out of their Philadelphia apartment with a plan to transform the business of selling eyeglasses. Their low-cost frames are a hit--as is their buy-one-give-one business model--and they've inspired countless copycats. “Warby Parker for X” is now a fundable business model in Silicon Valley.
But what has really set Warby Parker apart, and the reason Fast Company named it the most innovative company of 2015, has been Blumenthal and Gilboa's knack for brand-building in the Internet age. Their approach involves innovative technology, smart social media marketing, and a growing physical retail presence. They’ve also built an enviable company culture and pioneered a new approach to corporate giving.
We’ll cover these topics and more on Thursday, February 26th, at 11:30 a.m. EST when Blumenthal and Gilboa join Fast Company contributing writer Max Chafkin for a live chat. Start submitting your questions now by using the comment box below.
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Hi everybody! Welcome to our live chat with Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa. They're the founders of Warby Parker, our 2015 Most Innovative Company. They'll be taking questions for the next hour so please chime in in the comments. We'll get started in a few minutes.
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Check out our March cover story on the company when you have a chance:
Warby Parker Sees the Future of Retail
Fast CompanyFor building the first great made-on-the-Internet brand. -
okay first question to get us started. Neil and Dave, you guys ready?
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In our piece we talk a lot about how you guys managed to build a great brand on the Internet. It’s one of the things, I think, that makes the company so impressive. I’m wondering: was that the plan from the beginning? How much of it was, “let’s make a new Ralph Lauren” and how much of it was, “let’s make cheaper glasses and sell them on the Internet”? -
We really started Warby Parker to solve our own problems. I met Neil and our other two co-founders, Jeff and Andy, in business school a few years ago. I had just lost a $700 pair of glasses and even though I was a full-time student, went my whole first semester without buying a new pair because I was frustrated by how expensive glasses were. Jeff, Neil and Andy shared this frustration. As we looked into why glasses were so expensive we learned about massive companies like Luxottica and Essilor and realized that most glasses in the US are marked up 10-20X what they cost to manufacture. We also thought there was an opportunity to sell glasses online.
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We thought that the best way to solve our own problem was to design the frames we love and sell direct to customers online while building a brand around fun, creativity and doing good (all things we care about.) By selling online, we could bypass the middlemen and sell glasses for $95 instead of $400. But, ultimately selling online is just one medium of selling and mediums constantly change - a brand is a point of view that lasts - a brand builds relationships with customers. We wanted to build a brand in hopes of influencing others, namely customers to expect more and other entrepreneurs/executives to run their companies in a more human-friendly manner. We thought if we're able to build a brand that scales, is profitable and does good in the world, and do so without charging a premium for it, it could be pretty impactful and hopefully inspire others to do the same
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We've got a question from a reader that I want to throw out there
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What do you feel is most influential in the spread of the WP brand: the grass-roots eyeglasses appeal or the one-for-one appeal?
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I'm gonna modify that slightly: what caused this thing to grow so quickly?
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by codenamemax via twitter 2/26/2015 4:39:12 PM -
Initially it was articles in GQ and Vogue. We literally launched to features in GQ and Vogue and traffic to the site went crazy. Orders started to pour in. We were woefully unprepared. We hit our first year's sales targets in 3 wks, sold out of our top 15 styles in 4 weeks. We think our first customers were most excited about the design, the price and the novelty of selling online (we have a cool home try-on program and GQ called us as the Netflix of eyewear.)
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We didn't spend a penny on customer acquisition in our first 2+ years in business and the majority of our traffic and sales are still generated through word of mouth. The main reason for that is our relentless focus on delivering value and great experiences to our customers, which in turn drives word of mouth. We design experiences with empathy for our customers, and that led to the development of our Home Try-On program, offering free shipping, free returns, etc and hiring an incredibly talented Customer Experience team to help customers with any questions that might arise.
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Neil, did that press just happen, or did you do something to help make it happen?
I mean, most startups would kill for the kind of launch you're talking about -
We leveraged every contact that we had to set up meetings with editors and writers. Sat down with them and told them our vision. We deliberately targeted GQ and Vogue because we were building a fashion brand and those are two of the best books in fashion.
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You also told me -- and I don't think I mentioned this in the story -- that you interviewed 40 PR firms
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I think what got people excited (both press and early customers) was that we were doing something different--we were bringing innovation to a massive industry that had been stagnant for decades. Offering a product that normally costs $400+ for $95 and selling it online. Plus we had beautiful products, a strong social mission and very customer friendly policies--there was a lot of depth to the story.
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David Gilboa, Max Chafkin, and Neil Blumenthal (left to right) are answering your questions live from Fast Company HQ
(Photo: Robbie Jones) -
Okay here's another reader question
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Do you have any plans to use direct mail as another channel to fuel you growth? There appears to be more of that effort recently, particularly in the postcard and self-mailer type of marketing print collateral.
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Never say never, but no current plans in the works
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We do believe in being experience focused, but medium agnostic. So nothing is ever truly off the table.
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Okay, but let's talk about some of your other offline marketing efforts.
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You've been building stores like crazy. 10 today, with, I think many more to come. Is that a big part of how you're acquiring new customers? Or are people who already know Warby Parker as an Internet brand showing up at the stores?
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We have 10 stores open and expect to open another 10 this year. The majority of our sales are through ecommerce and we expect that will continue to be the case. We find that customers love our stores and we've been blown away by the traffic and sales that are generated through this channel. But we also find they are great awareness drivers and increase our online traffic and sales. Increasingly customers are engaging with brands across multiple channels--90% of customers that transact in our stores have been to our website first--and
we are able to design experiences to serve those customers across channels. -
Have you done anything to connect brick-and-mortar experiences to fan’s social media or digital experiences overall?
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Besides making them great backdrops for instagram photos?
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Yeah, it's a major focus of ours. We want to build one holistic customer experience whether it's offline or online. Currently if you walk into our stores, our retail advisors are equipped with an iPad Mini that runs software that we built in-house that connects to the same platform that powers our website. Our retail advisors can look up order history, help you checkout and even take photos of you wearing our glasses which is then immediately emailed to you, so you can show a boyfriend or girlfriend and then once you have approval (we all need it sometimes), you can one-click add to cart and checkout from your mobile device or your home computer.
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How would you define innovation? And in your own words describe innovation at Warby Parker. What makes Warby Parker innovative?
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That's a big question, but it's an interesting one, I think. How does a company that has a very straightforward business -- selling eyeglasses -- think about innovation? What do you do to make sure you're not falling behind especially given that Warby Parker has been widely copied by competitors?
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Innovation for us is constantly improving experiences (apologies in advance if we overuse the word "experience.") And, we try to improve a lot of experiences - the experience of our customers, of our employees, of the community as a whole (hence our social mission) and even our impact on the environment.
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We look for sources of innovation throughout our organization. We have hundreds of employees who are some of the most creative thinkers in the world. In fact we ask every employee to submit an innovation idea at the end of each week--it can be related to their own job function, a major strategic directional shift or anything in between. We are firm believers that innovation can't be isolated in a "lab" but has to be infused through the entire organization.
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Dave, does anything good ever come out of the innovation ideas?
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One of my personal favorite innovation ideas was to launch Warby Barker for April's Fools Day a couple years back
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Okay we're getting a lot of good questions about social media, which is something that I think Warby Parker does very well
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The fast company intro mentions your use of social media to build your brand. What has been your strategy on social media, how has it evolved over time and to what do you attribute its success?
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Who handles your social media? How do you ensure that it is constantly in keeping with your brand and tone of voice?
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We have a dedicated team that really understands the brand. Many of the team members grew up on our Customer Experience team, so they're accustomed to making customers happy and working in a fast pace environment. Ultimately, it's all about hiring the right people and that those people live and breath the brand. We also tend to spend a lot of time reading what people are saying about us online and how others react to what we post. It's an important customer touchpoint just like our website and our stores.
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We really view social media platforms as a way to create a conversation with customers. We started getting a lot of customer service inquiries through channels like Twitter and one fun thing our team started doing was to record video responses instead of 140 character responses. We don't have a fancy studio--our team would just record a webcam video, upload the link to YouTube and tweet the link back to the customer. On average these videos are getting 130+ views as people retweet them, which is the equivalent of getting a friendly customer service email and forwarding that email to 130 friends.
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