The Right Frame of Mind



1 / 6 Chevron Chevron Beckett Optical frames in Striped Evergreen.

While deplaning in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 2008, a young business student named David Gilboa left his eyeglasses—a pair of $700 black titanium frames by Prada—behind. Upon realizing this, the vacationing Gilboa had two thoughts: he couldn’t believe he’d left his glasses on a plane, and he couldn’t believe he’d spent $700 on said glasses.

A few months later, back in the States, Gilboa—now a student at Wharton—got in line to buy an iPhone, where, once again, he began thinking about that lost pair of Pradas.

“I couldn’t figure out why this technology that has been around for hundreds of years should cost more than this magical, $200 iPhone,” he says. “So I started talking to some of my classmates about it.”

One of those classmates was Neil Blumenthal, who had spent the previous five years running VisionSpring, a global nonprofit that helps impoverished communities make and sell affordable eyeglasses. “Close to a billion people don’t have access to eyeglasses,” he says. “It has a profound impact on their ability to learn and to work.”

Along with two other classmates, Blumenthal and Gilboa began brainstorming over nightly drinks, electrified by the idea of upending the eyewear industry. Once they learned that the entire network is a closed loop—that a handful of companies design, distribute, and sell; that the company that makes Ray-Bans also owns Sunglass Hut—they knew they’d found their opening.

And Warby Parker was born.

The concept was simple and elegant: cut out the middlemen, offer classic, beautiful frames for just $95, keep overhead low by selling primarily online, and donate one pair for each purchased. Gilboa and Blumenthal were told it would never work.

“We’d hear, ‘You know, if people could sell glasses online, someone would already be doing it,’ ” Gilboa says. “But that just made us more excited.”

With $100,000 of their own money, they hired a veteran eyewear designer, then began linking up their own supply chain and building their Web site. “We obsessed over every pixel,” Gilboa says. The names Warby and Parker were found in Jack Kerouac’s earliest diaries, and that little origin story itself epitomizes the brand’s DNA: if you drew a Venn diagram with “bohemian” on the left and “twee” on the right, Warby Parker would reside perfectly in the middle. It’s as much Wes Anderson as Andy Warhol, and the nearly three-year-old company has such mass appeal that C.E.O.’s Gilboa and Blumenthal have now turned away some would-be investors.

For all their do-gooding, however, Blumenthal will cop to one uncharitable thought: “I’m not sure if [our competitors] realize the potential for our impact—kind of how Blockbuster didn’t recognize the impact of Netflix, until it was too late.” He laughs. “That’s what we’re hoping.”