The story
The company was founded in 2010 in Philadelphia by Neil Blumenthal, Andrew Hunt, David Gilboa, and Jeffrey Raider while they were MBA students at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Blumenthal, Hunt, Gilboa, and Raider received a $2,500 seed investment through the Venture Initiation Program and launched the company in February 2010. That month, shortly after launching, the company was covered by Vogue and GQ.
In May 2011, Warby Parker raised its first round of funding totaling $2.5 million. In September 2011, the company raised a Series A round of $12.5 million. In September 2012, it raised a $37 million Series B round. It raised an additional $4 million in February 2013 from American Express and Mickey Drexler. In 2011, Warby Parker shipped more than 100,000 pairs of glasses and had 60 employees. By the end of 2012, the company had grown to around 100 employees. In April 2015, the company raised $100 million in a funding round led by T. Rowe Price, valuing it at $1.2 billion.
In 2017, the company opened a 34,000-square-foot, $16 million optical lab in Rockland County, New York, to oversee a portion of the lens manufacturing process.
Warby Parker began offering virtual prescription check tests in 2017. The company released its first-ever kids’ line of glasses in January 2018.
In the early years of the company, in addition to eyeglasses, sunglasses, and contact lenses, Warby Parker sold monocles with prescription lenses as a way to reflect the brand’s emphasis on fun and whimsy.
In March 2018, Warby Parker raised $75 million in Series E funding, bringing its total funding to about $300 million.
In February 2019, Warby Parker released a Virtual Try-On feature that uses augmented reality and the iPhone's facial-mapping technology to display frames at realistic scale and placement on a user's face.
In November 2019, Warby Parker released its first brand of daily contacts, Scout by Warby Parker.
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In August 2020, Warby Parker raised $245 million in a funding round that valued the company at $3 billion. The $245 million was a combination of a Series F round and a Series G round.
In July 2021, Warby Parker introduced the Virtual Vision Test app, a successor to its 2017 virtual prescription check, that allows iPhone users to update eyeglass and contact lens prescriptions.
On September 29, 2021, the company became a public company via direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Warby Parker was the first public benefit corporation to go public through a direct listing.
In November 2021, Warby Parker opened its second U.S. laboratory, in Summerlin, Nevada, near Las Vegas. The 69,000-square-foot lab was built to primarily serve customers living west of Texas.
In October 2023, a federal appeals court ruled that the company's use of keyword 1-800 Contacts in search engine optimization to redirect search engine users to its website was not in violation of U.S. trademark law.
From April 1 to 8, 2024, Warby Parker made free solar eclipse glasses available at its U.S. retail stores to provide safe viewing of the Great North American Eclipse.
From Wikipedia’s article on Warby Parker, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.7