Warby Parker Wants To Be The Warby Parker Of Contact Lenses

The pioneering online retailer is expanding into an $11 billion market. It's "bigger than, like, selling mattresses"

- Austin Carr And Kiley Roache

ONE MORNING IN SEPTEMBER, DAVE Gilboa stood on a staircase at Warby Parker’s library-like headquarters in New York to tell employees about the eyewear retailer’s future. There had been some modest milestones to celebrate, including a new collection of frames handcrafted in Italy and a store opening at the King of Prussia shopping mall outside Philadelphia. But the big reveal was on Gilboa’s face. Or rather, it was on his eyeballs.

On Nov. 19 the company unveiled Scout, a line of daily contact lenses. It’s the first time Warby Parker, whose $95 tortoiseshell frames are ubiquitous in coworking spaces and third-wave coffee shops, has expanded beyond eyeglasses since Gilboa and co-Chief Executive Officer Neil Blumenthal started the company almost a decade ago. At $440 for a year’s supply, the lenses will be slightly cheaper than many daily contacts but will be sold with what Warby says will be a much-improved ordering process.

Gilboa’s speech was one of several events Warby held this fall to get its 2,000-plus employees appropriately excited for a product that seems impossible to get excited about. “This feels orders of magnitude larger than everything we’ve done,” Gilboa told Bloomberg Businessweek after the meeting.