Eyewear retailer co-founder sets sights on physical sites, including one in Denver
After opening its first Colorado store in Boulder last year, online-born prescription-eyewear retailer Warby Parker is graduating to a second location in the state, this one in Denver.
The new store opens Saturday in the Cherry Creek Shopping Center, 3000 E. First Ave. A third location is headed to Lower Downtown’s Dairy Block later this year, although a date has not been announced.
Warby Parker started in 2010 exclusively as an e-commerce company, relying on inhouse designers and direct sales to customers to keep the costs of its stylish frames and prescription eyeglasses and sunglasses lower than its brick-and-mortar competitors. In recent years, Warby Parker has embraced traditional stores, opening more than 60 locations in the U.S. and Canada. Denver had been on the company’s wish list, according to co-founder and co-CEO Neil Blumenthal.
“Nearly six years after first stopping in Denver with our Class Trip — a mobile store in the form of a yellow school bus — we’re excited to finally put down roots in such a notable junction of innovation, alongside many like-minded startups and companies we admire,” Blumenthal said in a news release.
The company is hardly the only online-born brand that has expanded in recent years into retail’s physical realm. Amazon, the king of e-commerce, in November opened a pop-up store inside the Whole Foods at Union Station in downtown Denver, bringing tech such as Amazon Echo smart speakers and Kindle ereaders within an arm’s reach of shoppers buying produce and baked goods. It was one of five pop-up shops Amazon opened in Whole Foods stores last fall.
University of Denver business professor Theresa Meier Conley, who has years of experience developing tech-focused products such as video on-demand, notes the human need to see, touch and connect with products and services in person as a force driving companies to seek a more balanced approach to online and brick-and-mortar selling.
“Pop-up stores and these experiences that bring things to life are part of that human connection that is really essential to all of us,” Conley recently said of the future of American shopping. “The pendulum always comes back because of that human piece of it, that human connection and the need to do more than type on a keyboard.”
Shoppers on Saturday will find a store adorned to look like a library, with glasses displayed on oak shelves and a marble “reference desk” where they can seek help with frame adjustments and order pickups.
A team of “advisers” — armed with tablets to check shoppers out and provide them with digital overviews of frames they try on — will be circulating. A special Denver-only set of glasses will be for sale.