MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES 2015
1. Warby Parker
For building the first great
made-on-the-Internet brand.
Over the past five years, scads of
e-commerce startups have shown early promise and then promptly crashed back to
earth.
Groupon added new markets around the world and even bought Super Bowl
ads without, apparently, bothering to pay attention to whether customers were
actually happy with the service.
Fab’s Jason Goldberg seemed to think he could
build a high-design Amazon in a matter of months rather than years, even if it
meant dumbing down his product line. But Warby Parker has avoided this fate—not
thanks to its clever vertically integrated, buy-one-give-one business model,
but because of its founders' fanatical focus on brand and execution.
"We’re often asked why Warby has been successful," co-CEO Neil Blumenthal
says. "If we sum it up in one word, it’s deliberate."
You wouldn’t know it, except by
looking at the results.
Annual revenues at the five-year-old company are
"well over" $100 million, according to a person familiar with its
finances.
Meanwhile, its two CEOs, who founded the company with two other
Wharton classmates, have transformed what was a niche web shop into the hottest
thing in offline retail, with 10 stores so far and sales-per-square foot
figures that rival those of Tiffany & Co. "When we launched, a lot of
people bucketed us as an e-commerce company, but we never thought of ourselves
as an e-commerce company," Gilboa says.
"The only products we sell
now are glasses, but we think our brand can stand for much more than that over
a long time period."
That's an ambition that many e-commerce companies
have talked about. Warby Parker is the only one so far that seems likely to
pull it off.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3039614/most-innovative-companies-2015/
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