What if customers wanted to visit your online company?

Warby Parker launched with an attractive challenge to conventional eyewear retail: sell its own designs directly to customers at a lower advertised starting price. A website made that proposition scalable beyond a single shop. But glasses sit on a person's face. Their fit, appearance, and meaning are difficult to settle through a product image alone. The company's early experience is useful because customers did not simply choose between the online business and an established optical store. Some asked to visit the online business itself.

In a 2013 Knowledge at Wharton interview, co-founder Neil Blumenthal recalled customers asking to stop by after the 2010 launch. The founders did not have a showroom, so they displayed frames in an apartment. He described those encounters as opportunities to understand what customers liked and wanted. This is an attributed founder account, not an independently measured experiment. Still, it identifies a concrete encounter and a bounded response: accept visitors with an improvised setup rather than immediately sign a lease or reject the requests as inconsistent with the model.

Warby Parker also offered Home Try-On during this period, sending a selection of frames for customers to evaluate before buying. The company therefore had more than one way to address uncertainty about appearance and fit. Physical contact did not necessarily mean a conventional store, and a direct relationship did not necessarily mean every interaction occurred online. For a leader, that distinction matters. A distribution channel is a means of delivering a proposition. It can become an unnecessary constraint if it is treated as the company's identity.

The move into permanent retail became tangible in April 2013 with a New York flagship, documented by contemporary coverage and later company filings. The sequence included earlier showrooms and stores within other stores. It was not an overnight conversion from a purely virtual operation to a national chain. By the 2021 registration statement, Warby Parker described an integrated business with 145 retail locations at the end of June. That later footprint establishes expansion, not that each store was profitable or that physical retail was the sole source of growth.

The stakeholders' needs help explain what had to be tested. Customers wanted confidence in a purchase and access to service. Employees needed an environment in which they could help without making the process cumbersome. The company needed enough demand to justify space, staffing, and inventory-related work. A landlord's long-term commitment would change the risk of an experiment that had initially been easy to reverse. What began as listening to a customer could therefore become a materially different operating business as it scaled.

Opening stores was not a free extension of an internet brand. It brought fixed costs, location choices, service expectations, and management demands. The company's registration statement describes both channels and business risks, which is a better basis for evaluation than the visual appeal of a flagship. The relevant comparison is not online sales versus store sales in isolation. It is whether the combined experience improves access, confidence, and repeat business enough to justify the additional obligations. That is a question for evidence, not a conclusion supplied by the word omnichannel.

The teaching lesson is to preserve the customer problem while allowing the delivery model to change. In this episode, a low-cost encounter revealed a possible role for in-person interaction before permanent retail became substantial. A founder can ask what the visitor was trying to accomplish that the original channel did not fully provide. The answer may justify a new channel, a better digital tool, or a different service altogether. This vignette examines the 2010 to 2021 development; it does not describe Home Try-On as a currently available program or assume that every digitally founded brand should open stores.

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