AI Summary
5 min readIn March 2010, the four founders of Warby Parker were panicking over a problem they never imagined: being too successful. Their online glasses store had launched just a month earlier, and features in GQ and Vogue had triggered an avalanche of orders. Within three weeks, they hit their sales target for the entire year. Their hastily assembled website couldn’t even add a “sold out” tag, and their Chinese suppliers would take months to produce new stock. With a backlog of 20,000 customers, the founders were working frantically out of a Philadelphia apartment. Co-founder Neil Blumenthal was hunched over his laptop responding to angry emails when his phone rang. A doctor from the hospital around the corner had received a delay notice and asked if he could just come over and try on frames in person. Blumenthal looked around the room—boxes piled to the ceiling, fast food debris everywhere—and reluctantly gave his address. An hour later, the doctor arrived in scrubs, picked out his frames, and left smiling. “I’ve never understood why glasses cost so much,” he said. The encounter planted a seed in Blumenthal’s mind: maybe their online-only model was missing something.
The bet on physical stores
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:34) **The Overwhelming Launch** - Warby Parker’s founders are buried in orders after a GQ and Vogue feature, facing a 20,000-customer backlog and a website that can’t even show a “sold out” sign.
- 2 (08:15) **Betting on Bricks & Mortar** - Three years later, Warby Parker is a successful online brand, but co-founder Neil Blumenthal is pushing to open physical stores, a terrifying prospect for his business partner.
- 3 (11:12) **Del Vecchio Returns** - In Milan, the 80-year-old Luxottica founder Leonardo Del Vecchio confronts his CEO, Andrea Guerra, accusing him of being too slow to adapt to the digital threat from Warby Parker.
- 4 (16:32) **A Hostile Goodbye** - At Luxottica’s summer party, Del Vecchio delivers a cryptic “thank you” note to CEO Guerra, signaling his return to power and the end of Guerra’s tenure.
- 5 (19:43) **The Merger Bait and Switch** - Del Vecchio uses a false admission of weakness to convince Essilor’s CEO to agree to a merger, securing his company’s future dominance.
- 6 (21:55) **The Mega-Merger is Sealed** - In 2017, Luxottica and Essilor announce a $48 billion merger, creating a behemoth that controls every aspect of the eyewear supply chain.
- 7 (24:14) **Warby Parker Goes Vertical** - Warby Parker opens stylish physical stores across America, discovering that brick-and-mortar drives both in-store and online sales, becoming its own version of vertical integration.
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Show Notes
Warby Parker is three weeks old and its online glasses store is proving so popular the brand’s in danger of burning out. But if it’s going to pose a real challenge to Luxottica, it needs to learn how to sustain that momentum.
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