Shortly after Neil Blumenthal launched Warby Parker, the e-commerce eyeware startup known for its $95 retro-cool frames, customers emailed asking if they could “stop by” the company’s Philadelphia headquarters and check out the glasses for themselves. There was just one problem: Warby Parker — the brainchild of Blumenthal and three Wharton classmates, Andrew Hunt, Jeffrey Raider and David Gilboa — didn’t have a showroom. So they improvised.
“We said, ‘Sure, you can come to our… apartment,’ and we laid the glasses on the dining room table,” Blumenthal says.
When those would-be customers visited the makeshift shop back in 2010, “something special happened,” according to Blumenthal, 32. “They saw us sitting on the couch working our laptops, responding to orders, talking on the phone with customers. They saw the people behind the brand, which is so rare,” he says. “We realized we could learn from those customers — what they liked and what they wanted. Those people became some of our best advocates.”
This article originally appeared on Knowledge@Wharton.
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