How We Turned Eyeglasses Into a Recurring Revenue Growth Engine
PAIR EYEWEAR
New York City
Sophia Edelstein and Nathan Kondamuri, co-founders and co-CEOs
2-year revenue growth: 1,305% Sophia Edelstein and Nathan Kondamuri, both 29, co-founded Pair Eyewear in 2018, fresh out of Stanford University, where they came up with the idea. It started after a phone call from Kondamuri’s kid brother, Nikky, who was bummed he had to get glasses. It wasn’t that the 10-year-old was afraid of being called four eyes; he just didn’t want to have to choose a single pair of frames and be stuck with them for the next two years. His complaint made them think: What if eyeglasses could be changed every day, the way we change our clothes and shoes? Great idea, but as two college kids with no experience in product design, Edelstein says they needed some help turning that concept into a business.
“We realized there was this gap in the market, so we set out to redesign glasses as an interchangeable pair that had two parts: a base frame and a top frame that attaches with magnets allowing you to change the design on a daily basis. We got connected with Lee Zaro, the former head of product at Warby Parker, who has been in eyewear for over 20 years—this industry veteran sees what we see. We also met with angel investors and raised $150,000 from a family-and-friends round.
“That gave us enough confidence to leave our job offers on the table and lean into Pair full time. I was actually supposed to go to medical school.
“We started doing research and development with Lee, and went through hundreds of prototypes in two years. We wanted to make sure the two frames worked together seamlessly and were durable, so you could play tennis and run without the top frames falling off. Once we formalized the product, we patented it. As founders, we were focused on what makes our brand unique—and being able to defend that.
“The biggest advancement came when we moved our manufacturing in-house to two 20,000-square-foot manufacturing facilities in Irvine, California. We wanted to provide thousands of designs, and to do so sustainably, so we use a madeto-order approach. That allows our customers to get their orders quickly and lets us keep our price point low—base frames start at $60 and tops at $25—because we don’t have to hold excessive inventory in multiple SKUs.
“Today, Pair has 175 employees. We have licensing partnerships with Marvel, Sesame Street, Van Gogh, all the U.S. sports teams. We’ve raised more than $140 million and sold nearly three million top frames in the past two years.
“We still have Nikky in our frames. He’s at Middlebury College, on the varsity tennis team. That was a requirement: We had to make sure Nikky would be able to play tennis in the glasses.”