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Hello Marketing Chroniclers. This is another special edition of the newsletter when I send out ad-hoc essays that go deeper into a specific topic relevant to our profession.

This week I’m deep diving into a particular challenger brand that has been making a lot of noise lately: Warby Parker.

Enjoy 🧠

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Warby Parker’s Unfinished Business In Canada

Founded by Neil Blumenthal, Andrew Hunt, David Gilboa and Jeffrey Raider while classmates at the University of Pennsylvania back in 2010, Warby Parker has been on a legendary growth trajectory over the past 15 years.

Going up against giants such as Ray-Ban, Oakley, and LVMH, Warby Parker knew better than trying to fight hand-to-hand combat with deep-pocketed competitors.

Instead, they followed a challenger brand playbook that others could learn from.

Let’s dive in.

The Eyewear Category

With a projected CAGR of 10.1% over the next 5 years, the eyewear category in Canada is sizzling hot.

According to the Canadian Ophthalmological Society, 7 in 10 Canadians have experienced one or more symptoms around their eyes and vision in the past two years. Among the biggest factors impacting this trend has been excessive exposure to screens, UV rays, and environmental factors such as wildfire smoke and pollution (particularly in the western provinces).

In addition to an increasing need for eyewear – whether prescription or sunglasses – the Canadian public health system also covers eyecare for children, seniors and low-income families across some provinces, whereas the majority of private insurers offer some sort of benefits around it, as well.

The combination of these factors has also been propelled by an interesting cultural shift in society: people have started to see glasses as a fashion statement. Kids are getting excited about needing to wear glasses (unlike years ago when they would be teased with insults such as “four-eyes”), and prominent celebrities such as Lebron James, Johnny Depp, Meryl Streep, Spike Lee, Hailey Bieber and countless others wear them not only for necessity but as a style piece (some going as far as wearing non-prescription glasses, also known as faux focals, just for the looks of it).

Therefore, as Warby Parker was entering the scene in the early 2010s, there was a lot of momentum building up in the category for challenger brands to disrupt.

Painting The Full Picture

Unlike category leaders who owned physical spaces in busy shopping areas, Warby Parker didn’t yet have the capital to take such risks and therefore needed a nimbler approach to breakthrough in the category.

In the Canadian market, according to Tracksuit data, there are around 20.9M people that shop the eyewear category. That’s about 66% category penetration, so it’s a big enough space that can welcome innovative customer experience approaches.

Despite vision deterioration not starting typically until around the ages of 40-44, Warby Parker has a respectable level of aided awareness among those aged below 44 years of age in Canada.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise since eyewear continues to grow as a fashion statement, therefore brands that over-index in associations with “style”, “trendy”, and “affordable” end up entering the content consumption sphere earlier than in years past when glasses were simply seen as a necessity as opposed to a luxury.

With that, e-commerce eyewear brands had a major opportunity in front of them: by no longer needing a bricks and mortar location to sell eyewear to younger demographics who are more comfortable with digital stores, Warby Parker went to market as a Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) brand to start, effectively being able to offer affordability at smaller economies of scale without compromising on quality and style.

Warby Parker invested heavily into creating an intuitive, easy to navigate online shopping experience, going as far as offering a “Home Try-On” program where customers were allowed to order up to 5 glasses for free to try at home before deciding on which one to buy.

And if this wasn’t enough, they also put dollars behind a public relations push to appear across iconic style magazines such as GQ and Vogue, who dubbed Warby Parker as a “line of boutique vintage-inspired frames and lenses for savvy urbanites at a revolutionary price point” and the “Netflix of eyewear”. The board was set.

When we dig deeper into brand tracking data about Warby Parker, we see that the brand is largely associated with being stylish, good quality, and digitally native. This in fact aligns quite well with what GQ was saying about them 15 years ago: “a boutique eyewear brand for savvy urbanites”.

To stay true to their positioning, the brand needed to think of new ways to continue to drive market penetration, and so as they gained scale, they opened their first bricks and mortar location in 2013 for those who had been asking for a physical shopping experience in the trendy Manhattan neighbourhood of SoHo.

Knowing what we know now, that move made perfect sense: with a median age of 38 years old, a household income of $145K/year, and sitting at the heart of the most iconic urban centre in the world, SoHo was the ideal location for a store to showcase the epitome of what Warby Parker represented.

As the years went by, Warby Parker continued to expand its physical availability, now operating over 318 locations in the US, and 5 across Canada – all of them located in urban centres (Vancouver, Toronto, and Mississauga). Despite this immense footprint, many customers don’t reside across these urban centres, and so Warby Parker developed an app for customers to virtually try glasses on with the usage of Augmented Reality (AR).

This focus on the customer experience enabled Warby Parker to perfect the Product P before investing more heavily into advertising. Because as the old saying goes “there’s no amount of advertising that can save a bad product”, and that is something Warby Parker took it to heart.

If we fast forward to today, they now spend tens of millions of dollars in TV advertising, showing signs that they’re deep in the “growth stage” of the product category lifecycle, as they seek to maximize market share, expand distribution and build awareness with the mass market.

Tracksuit data has already shown us that Warby Parker significantly under-indexes with Gen-Zs compared to the rest of the category. And so, to address that weak link, they also frequently run social campaigns across Instagram and YouTube, commissioning Gen-Z celebrities such as Arch Manning and Emma Chamberlain to further entrench themselves into the biggest opportunity they have: 18-24 year olds.

Where Does Warby Parker Go from Here?

Looking purely at Canadian data from Tracksuit, despite being right up there with other challenger eyewear brands in terms of awareness, Warby Parker is underperforming at other stages of the funnel relative to its challenger peers. When we look at the middle and bottom stages of the funnel, we begin to see some cracks in the armour.

About 63% of those who are aware of a challenger eyewear brand in Canada say they will consider it in their next purchase occasion. But for Warby Parker that’s only 47% (8%/17% = 47%).

That alone (alongside awareness, since every challenger brand should remain focused on growing it) is the biggest opportunity for Warby Parker to further breakthrough in the Canadian market. There are a few hypotheses we could infer about what’s causing this:

• Physical Availability: The USA has 8.1X more physical store locations per capita than Canada. Despite e-commerce’s meteoric rise since the pandemic, it still only accounts for less than 10% of total retail sales in the country. The path to growth remains in bricks and mortar.

• Reach: despite awareness not being a problem relative to other challenger eyewear brands, 17% remains a significantly small number compared to the rest of the category. The big players (Ray-Ban, Oakley, Prada, etc.) easily cross the 70%+ awareness mark in key markets, so for Warby Parker they still have a long way to go. TV investments being made in the USA point to a path to growing mental availability in Canada.

• Category Entry Points: we’ve seen Warby Parker USA running consistent messaging around offering eye exams, various styles for all types, and even doing social good with their “Buy A Pair, Give A Pair” program. Though more research needs to be done on this front, based on Tracksuit perception data it’s safe to assume that “looking for stylish frames” is well covered as a CEP in Canada – now it’s time to expand into more CEPs to broaden Warby Parker’s brand salience.

• Brand Perceptions: though Warby Parker over-indexes in being perceived as offering “stylish designs” among challenger eyewear brands in Canada, variety, comfort and value perceptions remain a challenge in the eyes of Canadian consumers. Addressing these through branded communications such as this one are another path to improving consideration.

What Gets Measured, Gets Improved

As outlined in this column, when one has the data to understand what’s going on in the minds of consumers, brand managers effectively are no longer flying blind.

By doing a simple analysis of demographic opportunities, media channels being overlooked, funnel leaks, and perception gaps, we were able identify where Warby Parker is strong at and where it needs to focus on to continue to capture growth in the Canadian market.

The most overlooked part of such an analysis is not in identifying strengths and opportunities, but instead in showing progress to stakeholders holding the purse strings.

Brand equity metrics have always been a tricky thing to measure, but now with affordable brand trackers such as Tracksuit brand managers are able to equip themselves with the data to prove the impact of their initiatives beyond impressions and reach.

Because in the end of the day, what gets measured, gets improved.

More of PPA:

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• 💌 In case you missed it: We Study Consumers, But Consumers Don't Study Our Ads — Why marketers need to get back to planet Earth, differentiation vs distinctiveness, and the practice of brand planning

PPA 

Pedro Porto Alegre is a seasoned marketing strategist with in-depth experience building brand and communications strategies for top-tier B2C and B2B organizations across North America. His repertoire extends from crafting and executing integrated multi-media brand marketing campaigns to the commercialization of performance-driven innovations for multimillion-dollar and nascent brands alike.