Warby Parker Eye Glasses, Founded By Wharton Grads, Now Open In Suburban Square
Eye glasses retailer, Warby Parker, recently opened a new store at Suburban Square. Warby Parker has two other stores in the Philadelphia Area, one in Center City and the other at the King of Prussia Mall.
The company got its start in 2008 when four Wharton students were sitting around griping about the high price of glasses. Not content to just complain about it, they did some rudimentary research and discovered that the same company, Luxottica – owned LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Ray-Ban and Oakley – as well as the licenses for Chanel and Prada prescription frames.
In March of 2016, Forbes Magazine wrote –
With that epiphany, the idea began to take shape and the business model was born. They would create a vertically integrated company. Neil [Neil Blumenthal, one of the four founders] explains, “It was really about bypassing retailers, bypassing the middlemen that would mark up lenses 3-5x what they cost, so we could just transfer all of that cost directly to consumers and save them money.
When they launched WarbyParker.com in February of 2010), they were 100% online, billing themselves as the “Netflix of Eyewear.” Inc. Magazine reported that –
Customers sent emails asking to come to the company’s offices to try on glasses. Warby Parker didn’t have offices–so Blumenthal invited customers to his apartment. The demand gave the co-founders the confidence to open shops within boutique retailers and launch the Warby Parker Class Trip, a store built into a school bus that visited 15 cities. “We were able to explore different neighborhoods in each one of those cities, so it gave us a blueprint and data for where to open up stores,” Blumenthal says. In April 2013, Warby Parker opened its first, in New York City’s SoHo.
As of March 15, according to Scrapehero.com, Warby Parker had 138 stores. In August of 2020, TechCrunch.com reported that the company had raised $245 million, and was valued at $3 billion.