Warby Parker bets future on adding hundreds of stores

Bloomberg

As Warby Parker heads towards becoming a public company, the co-founders of the eyewear brand valued at $3 billion are pitching a growth strategy centered on stores.
It’s quite a turn for a company that last decade ignited a boom in digital brands that convinced investors to bet billions largely on their ability to grow quickly online.
But in this category, where sales of glasses and contacts still depend on customer relationships with eye doctors
in physical locations, Warby Parker plans to greatly expand its store fleet.
For starters, roughly three dozen locations will open this year, bringing the total to about 160, the company said.
“There’s still room for us
to open hundreds of stores,” Neil Blumenthal, a Warby Parker co-founder and its co-chief executive officer, said in an interview.
“When we look at our competitors—the large public optical retailers—they all have well over a thousand locations across the US. At the end of the day, the vast majority of Americans need glasses and prefer to buy those in person.”
Warby Parker is now 11 years old, and growth isn’t as easy. There’s more competition, both from online brands, such as Zenni, and entrenched players, like Pearle Vision,
that have improved their
e-commerce.
The company hasn’t had to release financial results as a private company, but data from Bloomberg Second Measure show the retailer’s sales growth nearly doubled in 2013 and then slowed down.
From 2016 to 2019, annual gains averaged about 25%. And during 2020, growth was about 7% before rebounding this year, according to Second Measure, which analyses anonymous credit card transactions.
“They’ve been around for a while, and people who would have had a proclivity to try them by now already have,” said Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester.
“Their biggest challenge is growth. How do you find the next tranche of customers?”
Investors have poured about $530 million into Warby Parker, including a series
G funding round of $120 million in August, according to researcher CB Insights.