Warby Parker at Goldman Sachs Conference: Strategic Growth and AI Integration

On Thursday, 04 September 2025, Warby Parker (NYSE:WRBY) presented at the Goldman Sachs 32nd Annual Global Retailing Conference 2025. Co-founders Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa outlined the company’s strategic plans and performance. Despite challenges like tariffs, Warby Parker reported strong growth from May, emphasizing expansion and technological innovation. The company aims to boost EBITDA and maintain competitive pricing.

Key Takeaways

• Warby Parker aims for a long-term EBITDA margin of 20%.
• The company is developing smart glasses with Google.
• Store expansion continues with 300 locations reached.
• AI integration is a major focus across business operations.
• The home try-on program will be sunsetted, reallocating resources to customer acquisition.

Financial Results

• Warby Parker experienced consistent growth starting in May.
• EBITDA is expanding by 100 to 200 basis points annually.
• Gross margins remain stable in the mid-50s, including retail and optometrist costs.
• New stores have a target payback period of under 20 months.
• The company is outperforming larger optical competitors in market share.

Operational Updates

• Strategic initiatives include expanding store footprint and increasing eye exam service awareness.
• Warby Parker plans to open around 45 new stores this year, focusing on suburban and urban markets.
• AI is leveraged across the business, including in eyewear design and marketing.
• The home try-on program will end as resources shift to other growth areas.

Future Outlook

• Warby Parker expects steady growth in the second half of 2025.
• The partnership with Google will bring smart glasses with AI capabilities to market soon.
• Marketing efforts will focus on raising brand awareness and acquiring new customers.
• Investments in technology and AI are prioritized for future growth.

Q&A Highlights

• Tariff impacts have been mitigated through price adjustments and supply chain realignment.
• Growth is expected in the high teens, driven by various growth drivers.
• Capital allocation focuses on opening stores, technology investments, and AI glasses development.

For a detailed insight, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs 32nd Annual Global Retailing Conference 2025:

Unidentified speaker, Host: Good morning, and welcome to this next session of our thirty second Annual Global Retailing Conference. I’m very pleased to introduce our next session with Warby Parker. Here with me today, I have Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa, both co founders and co CEOs. So welcome, Neil and Dave.

Neil Blumenthal, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: Thanks for having us.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Neil, can you start us off with some updated thoughts on your outlook for The U. S. Vision care market?

Neil Blumenthal, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: Sure. So one of the things that we’ve seen is sort of consistent behavior from our customers. Now we tend to have slightly higher income customers than the overall market. We certainly saw some challenges in April given the tariffs announcements as a lot of people have seen, but we’ve come out of that and from May onwards have had sort of strong and steady growth. We see consistent repeat purchase behavior.

We I think like many companies need to figure out how to navigate the tariff situation and we’re surprised by the significant impact it had on consumer sentiment in April, but are feeling confident right now.

Unidentified speaker, Host: That’s great to hear. One of the questions that we’re asking all companies at our conference today is their outlook for the second half and the health of the consumer. What’s your outlook for the 2025 relative to recent results? Do you expect things to be same, better or worse?

Neil Blumenthal, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: We expect them to be consistent and we’re delivering higher growth again very consistent from May onwards. We’ll be comping sort of our period in Q4 of last year where we saw an acceleration of growth and sort of our consistent growth that we’ve guided towards incorporates that more challenging comp for us. So yes, in general, we’re feeling confident. We’re seeing strong traffic in our stores and our apps and website and seeing consistent product mix and conversion.

Unidentified speaker, Host: That’s great. As a follow-up, is there any differences in how you would think about that same question going into 2026?

Neil Blumenthal, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: We’ve always kind of positioned ourselves, especially since COVID, as like, hey, it doesn’t matter what’s going on externally. We need to deliver. We need to deliver on growth. We need to continue to expand EBITDA, which we’ve done consistently at 100 to 200 basis points. So that means we need to come up with more creative marketing strategies.

We go ahead and do that. But right now, we feel that the wind is at our backs and are feeling good going into 2026.

Unidentified speaker, Host: That’s really great to hear. Another question that we’re talking to nearly every company about is the competitive landscape. How would you characterize the competitive today? What are your expectations for share consolidation going forward? Do you expect that to speed up, slow down or stay the same?

Dave Gilboa, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: Yes. So if you look at our category, it’s certainly a competitive marketplace. But it’s one that the competitive landscape hasn’t materially changed really since we launched in 2010. There really haven’t been many new entrants that have taken meaningful share. The market is made up roughly fifty-fifty of large retail chains and the other 50% is independent optometry practices where eye doctors operate their own businesses and sell their own glasses and contacts.

And we expect that over time there will be more consolidation where those independent doctors will be making up a smaller percentage of the overall market, but it’s not a drastic change and really haven’t seen significant share shift within the existing players. I’d say, we continue to outperform the market and continue to take share both in good times and bad and expect that to continue.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Very clear. Let’s shift to some of the strategic initiatives that are driving that share gain. And I think first and most importantly is your store strategy. Can you elaborate on how your densification strategy in certain suburban or urban markets fits into your longer term goal of having more than 900 stand alone stores in North America? Which markets or areas do you see the most opportunity?

Dave Gilboa, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: Yes. So, we have around 300 stores now out of roughly 45,000 stores in The U. S. And so, still a massive opportunity for us to scale our footprint. And this year, we’ll open around 45 stores, including some new Target locations that we’re excited about and still see a path to open several 100 stores over the next few years, both in new markets and in additional markets.

Right now, we operate in around two twenty markets, but only 30 of those have more than one store. So, we have lots of opportunity to add incremental stores into areas where we already have a presence. And what we see in some of our densest markets where we have the most established store footprint like New York, Chicago, Boston, Dallas. It’s an area these are areas that continue to see high growth within those geos both from our store sales, but also ecom. So, when we have more of a presence in a market, there’s more awareness, our marketing is more effective, and we tend to see the benefit of that over time.

And so, we’re excited and see lots of opportunity to continue to open stores, both in existing markets and some of the new markets that we don’t have a presence in yet.

Unidentified speaker, Host: The new aspect of the strategy, and you mentioned it just a moment ago, is the Target shop in shops. And you’ve opened a couple of those this year, five planned for the year. I know it’s very early, but is there anything that you can share regarding the performance of those stores and what you see as the opportunity ahead?

Neil Blumenthal, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: Yes, we’ve been really excited about this partnership. For one thing, we have great partners in Target and we’ve been able to build the equivalent of a Warby Parker store. So you walk in, it feels exactly the same as a Warby store. The shelving systems, the assortment is the same. It’s staffed by Warby Parker employees, the revenues recognized by Warby Parker and they use the technology of our point of sale, what we call a point of everything that we’ve developed in house and we’re getting great results from the initial five locations and most importantly, gotten great feedback from our customers.

Unidentified speaker, Host: That’s great to hear. Question that we get very regularly about your stores is what the underlying comps are of those stores. Is there anything that you can help us regarding like the typical underlying comp of a new store as it starts to go through the maturity curve, both in its early days and as it gets quite older? And then how are you thinking about getting customers into the store when you open a new store? What proportion of those sales are driven by new customer acquisition versus stronger sales from existing customers?

Neil Blumenthal, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: What you’ll continue to see is us continue to invest in marketing to raise brand awareness. Often when we hear potential customers why haven’t they purchased from us, it’s because there isn’t a store nearby them. So you’ll continue to see us open more stores. As Dave mentioned, there’s almost 45,000 optical shops in The U. S.

And convenience is certainly important and all the large optical players have well over 1,000 locations. When we open in a market, we tend to get welcomed by that local community. We often commission artwork from local artist. We get featured in local press and celebrated. So we continue to see similar ramps as we’ve seen over the last fifteen years as we open up stores.

As Dave mentioned, we’re increasing our densification particularly in suburban markets because when we started opening up stores, we had the benefit of our large e commerce business and we started to focus really on sort of these urban sort of cool street locations whether it was Green Street in SoHo or Abbe Kinney in LA or Hayes Valley in San Francisco. And we’ve now been able to sort of move out more into the suburbs where we’re in lifestyle centers or even grocery anchored centers, which is nice because they tend to be lower rent. But we continue to have a lot of drivers of retail productivity. So one is just the mix of products. So from a progressive standpoint, these are the lenses that help you see in the distance and up close and we tend to see higher progressives mix in our suburban locations and these products are more expensive and higher margin.

We are still in the early days of our eye care business. So all of our new stores have eye exam suites and we now have hundreds of optometrists that work for us and across the industry 75% of people buy glasses where they got their eye exam. So we are just at the beginning of being known for having a great exam experience and some of our technology heritage also contributes to that and that we have top of the line equipment, we have software that we’ve developed in house to make our optometrists very efficient and also makes them want to come to and work for us so that way they can focus on clinical care and spend less time on the administrative tasks of being an eye doctor. We’re also still at the early days of our insurance business and becoming more in network with more and more networks. So all of these things are contributing to retail productivity and driving comps both today and in the years ahead.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Let’s dig a little bit deeper into a couple of those drivers. You mentioned eye exams and what you’re doing to engage your customer, but also make sure that you have great employees in each of those stores. What’s the largest unlock for incremental eye exam growth from here?

Dave Gilboa, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: I think the main thing is just awareness. So we find that many of our customers who have been loyal customers for years aren’t aware of many of the new store locations that we’ve opened. Some of them aren’t aware that we offer eye exams at all or in their city. And so there’s a big effort underway just from a marketing and awareness standpoint just to let people know that while last time you bought glasses from Morby Parker, we told you had to go to a non Morby Parker doctor and bring us your prescription. Now we can serve those needs concurrently and we can do so very conveniently.

If you have contact lenses and if you’re looking for certain kinds of lenses that we maybe didn’t offer previously, we now offer those. And so, the biggest thing is just creating more awareness in the market. The second is continuing to open more stores and every one of our new stores we’re building out with eye exam suites, sometimes multiple exam rooms. The third is increasing penetration and awareness around our insurance offerings, where many customers and patients start their exam journey by going to their insurance portal and seeing which doctor is in network. And now we’re able to meet the demand of many of those types of customers and patients.

And the last piece is continuing to hire some of the best doctors in the country in the world and we’re becoming known as a great employer for optometrists. Our stores are located in places where eye doctors want to live. We’re using state of the art equipment in all of our exam rooms, including leading retinal imaging and enabling doctors to leverage this technology to serve patients better. And then a lot of our software capabilities and the customer experience that we’ve enabled in our stores enables doctors to really focus on patient care and they can rely on our software platforms and our store teams to serve customer needs and handle a lot of the tasks that often eat up time that takes them away from patient care other places. And so, I think all those factors are leading to us increasing the number of locations and kind of supply side eye care and then pairing that with lots of marketing and awareness and demand generating activities and those things are working and our eye exam business is growing really quickly.

We’re still massively underpenetrated relative to the rest of the category, and so still lots of opportunity ahead for us.

Unidentified speaker, Host: You’ve recently expanded your insurance partnerships. What proportion of customers that are in your potential network today are coming to Warby Parker? And what do you think the opportunity is over the course of the next couple of years? And specifically, insurance is about 7% of your business in ’twenty four. What do you think that can be over the course of the next one to three years?

Neil Blumenthal, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: Sure. Most optical retailers, right, the bulk of their business will remain pretty underpenetrated and we still provide exceptional value because the average of out of pocket for our customers that are shopping elsewhere using their vision insurances is over $200 So again, what we always want to be doing is providing exceptional value. So we’re able to do that even though on a relative basis we have a smaller sort of insurance business, but you’ll continue to see us be in more plans and then we’ll continue to take time for those members to learn that we’re in network and then of course for their sort of purchase cycle to hit. But we think that we’re still in the very early innings of our vision insurance business.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Very clear. You mentioned the importance of providing exceptional value to your customer, both for the insurance customer and for your pay out of pocket customer. Pricing has been top of mind for a lot of the industry. And you took a few pricing actions earlier in April. Are you seeing any pushback or elasticity to those pricing actions?

And how should we be thinking about your pricing plans for the rest of the year and into 2026? Is there more on the horizon?

Dave Gilboa, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: Yes. Ever since we’ve launched, we’ve made a commitment to our customers that we’re going to deliver exceptional value and that was inherent in the price of the prescription glasses that we introduced back in 2010, like the ones that I’m wearing cost $95 including prescription lenses and all the coatings that you would need, free shipping, free returns. And we still offer these glasses for $95 today, fifteen years later, in a category that has liberally taken price almost every year very consistently. And there’s been a lot of inflation in the category that has led to our value differentiation being much stronger today than it was even when launched in 2010. And we expect that commitment to continue.

And there certainly we’ve had lots of opportunities over the years, including when inflation was going up few years ago to take price and we chose not to do so. When tariffs were announced on Liberation Day, some of our cost inputs changed and that did cause us to take a fresh look at the pricing of all of our products. And we looked at a small number of SKUs where we thought we could adjust our prices, raise prices slightly, but still offer exceptional value relative to the rest of the category. And so we made those pricing changes while we left the majority of our pricing where it has always been. And we really didn’t see a change in elasticity from our customers, really didn’t see kind of any pushback or questions.

And I think that’s because we were still able to commit to our messaging around offering better value than other options. And so that enabled us to mitigate significant portion of the tariff increases and enabled us to continue to offer great value to our customers. And currently, we’re not planning to make any additional pricing changes at the moment.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Very clear. You mentioned tariffs, so let’s go there for a moment. How should we be thinking about the annualized headwind from tariffs on a full year basis once it’s fully in? And at what point do you expect to fully mitigate the currently enacted rates?

Neil Blumenthal, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: We feel that we’ve now fully mitigated them and that’s been incorporated into our guidance. I think when they first came out in April, jumped into action. Unfortunately, we had a bunch of muscle memory from COVID, but we took three actions. One was, as Dave was describing, sort of select and strategic price increases. We also realigned parts of our supply chain, which is more nimble, thanks to the learnings from COVID.

We also have two optical labs here in The U. S. Where we cut our lenses, insert them into our frames, ensure that Warby Parker hands are doing the final quality inspection that go to customers. So we were able to manage from a supply chain standpoint and then sort of made some OpEx reductions and now we feel like we’ve been able to fully mitigate the impact of tariffs and we’ll continue to be on a path to expand EBITDA and our plans over the last few years has been how do we expand EBITDA 100 to 200 basis points we think long term we’re at 20% EBITDA business and are on a path to get there.

Unidentified speaker, Host: So you do believe that one to two points of annual expansion is still achievable even in the current environment?

Neil Blumenthal, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: Yes, absolutely.

Unidentified speaker, Host: And the 20% is still achievable? Yes. Very clear. Thank you. How should we be thinking about the key levers of driving that?

Is that incremental SG and A leverage on top of what you’ve already delivered this year? Or do you expect gross margins to begin to grow?

Neil Blumenthal, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: Yes, primarily leverage on SG and A. We have stability in gross margin around in the mid-50s. And as a reminder, our gross margins are fully loaded with retail occupancy, with sort of salaries that we pay our optometrists, for example.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Very clear. Let’s go to one of the more exciting partnerships in the business today, which is your partnership with Google as you look to develop some smart glasses. What are the most differentiated aspects about your smart glasses initiative relative to what is also in the marketplace from potential competitors? And how are you thinking about that competitive differentiation that you’re going to serve to customers? How are you going to message that?

And what should we be expecting?

Dave Gilboa, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: Yes. So we’re excited to share a lot more about our product road map in the coming months. But these are going be really incredible products that look and feel like Warby Parker glasses designed for all day wear, designed to be used with prescriptions or non prescription lenses. And the biggest kind of difference from a use case standpoint is the AI is going to be incredible and the user experience is going to provide so much utility for wearers on an all day basis. And I think some of the existing products on the market today show that there is demand for glasses that have additional technology in them.

Our understanding is that the primary use cases are really to replace AirPods or take hands free photos and our products will do that exceptionally well. But the reason that we were really excited to partner with Google is because of their AI capabilities throughout their organization with Gemini and DeepMind and they have they’ve really invented the technology that all LLMs are based on and they continue to innovate in really meaningful ways. And they also have such massive capabilities across hardware and software with their Android platform. They power billions of devices. Users will be able to tap into products that they use every day from Gmail to Google Maps search.

So whether you’re kind of if you wake up and you’re used to kind of picking up your phone or logging into your computer to check your email and text, can imagine a world where you don’t have to do that anymore that you can just put on your glasses and walk down the street and the software will surface the relevant messages, you can respond to them on the go. If you see a sign about something or a building or you’re curious what kind of tree you’re looking at or what kind of bird you hear chirping, you can get intelligence and context around the real world about you. You can be speaking to someone in a different language and have real time translation. If you’re looking at a form that you’re filling out and you don’t remember your Marriott Bonvoy number, it will have integration with your Gmail and be able to pull that number out for you. And so we’re really excited for these products.

We think that they’re going to be really transformative in terms of how people engage with technology and will enable them to stop being tethered to kind of pulling a screen out of their pocket and engage more with the real world.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Very exciting. I’m excited to try them on when they finally launch, of course. You’ve mentioned AI as part of the reason why you’re excited about the smart glasses, but how are you integrating AI into your business? And what are the near term and longer term opportunities that you see?

Neil Blumenthal, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: We sort of have been leveraging AI across the business for many years now, whether it was developing the first sort of true to scale virtual try on for eyeglasses, right? It was a major technological challenge to fit a pair of glasses on somebody’s face virtually, like very different than applying makeup because you had a third party object that needed to sort of fit and understand your pupillary distance, where your nose bridge sits, where your ears are. So we have a strong history of leveraging AI, but now we sort of leverage it across the organization where we have what we call AI visionaries embedded in every single team across our corporate organization that are vibe coding and are finding ways to be more efficient and productive, whether it’s using AI and eyewear design or creating an AI agent that speaks in Warby voice. So our copywriters can be more focused on interesting marketing activations versus writing product descriptions, for example. Literally every aspect of our company is being rethought and reimagined leveraging this incredibly powerful technology.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Let’s go back to your core for a moment. You started with a single vision lens a couple of decades ago now and you’re wearing them. How should we be thinking of what is the core growth rate that you’re seeing in single vision glasses today? And what’s your expectation on a medium term basis?

Dave Gilboa, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: We continue to see strong growth in our glasses business and single vision business. If you look back at Q2, April was soft for the reasons that we spoke about related to consumer sentiment and behavior post Liberation Day, but after that trends that we were seeing across the business including in glasses and single vision were quite strong and enabled us to deliver double digit growth for glasses in Q2. And so if you kind of ring fence April, stronger growth than that and we are expecting that to continue. We see lots of opportunities to continue to expand our customer growth from new customer standpoint. We still have less than 2% market share in a really big category.

Our customers that do make a purchase from us tend to be really happy and tend to repeat on a very consistent timeframe. And so, we still see lots of future growth for our single division business.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Very clear. You talked a little bit about some of the near term trends that you’ve seen in April through the end of the second quarter. Your guidance in the back half calls for sustained 17% momentum. And that’s in an environment where a lot of other companies are calling for a lot more conservatism and caution into the back half. What gives you so much confidence in achieving that back half guidance range?

And are there any comments that you can provide on back to school, knowing that your back to school business is not necessarily a large driver?

Dave Gilboa, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: If you look back really over the last four quarters, going back to the back half of last year and the first half of this year, we’ve really seen kind of strong and consistent demand trends other than a couple air pockets, including Liberation Day and when there was some extreme weather, but outside of those macro effects, which were relatively short lived, we’ve seen consistency and strength from a demand standpoint and that’s given us confidence to lean in from a marketing standpoint and our marketing is working and we have the advantage of being direct to consumer. So we get such rapid signals around what’s working and what’s not and how to optimize and And we’re increasingly using AI to make those marketing capital allocation decisions and really shift dollars where we’re seeing the most efficiency. And so just based on the trends that we’ve seen not just kind of post April, but really going back over the last twelve months just gives us the confidence that demand will continue to be there in the category that has historically been a category that has very consistent demand outside of the pandemic period and the hangover. And we believe that we’re kind of back to that steady state where we continue to lean in, grow faster than the category because of all the initiatives that we have around opening stores, generating awareness through marketing, insurance, continuing our penetration around exams, contact classes, progressive, single vision.

We’ve set lots of growth drivers that we have confidence will work and continue to enable us to grow in the high teens.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Very clear. You’ve mentioned marketing several times now. And marketing has been a big opportunity from an awareness perspective, especially in terms of a store driver for some time. What’s changed in your marketing, whether that’s out of home, in home, digital, non digital? And do you think that low teens as a percentage of revenue is the right level longer term?

Neil Blumenthal, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: Yes. I think you’ll see consistency as marketing as a percent of revenue, but obviously the absolute dollars will continue to increase. One of the big things that we announced is that we’re sunsetting our home try on program and sat within our marketing line item. We’ll continue to spend those dollars, but there’ll be more focus on customer acquisition. We kind of it’s bittersweet to be sunsetting the home try on program, but we no longer need it given the strength of our virtual try on, our 300 locations, speaking of which our three hundredth is right here at Brookfield Place.

So if you have a chance to check it out, please do. And when we launched in 2010, GQ called us the Netflix of eyewear. And that was when Netflix was sending DVDs to people’s homes because we had this home try on, right? We shipped people five pairs of glasses to try on at home. And just as Netflix has sort of made the move to streaming, we no longer see a need for our home try on program.

But in general, we continue to see great performance across our channels, whether that’s linear and streaming or even direct mail or paid social. One of the things that we were excited to launch this past week was our partnership with Arch Manning. And that’s in a long line of very authentic collaborations that we’ve done. Arch is a long time glasses wearer. He’s a long time Warby Parker customer.

So our ads include images of him as a child wearing glasses, sometimes even within the football helmet, and just how we were part of the sort of conversation during sort of the opening weekend for college football. But you’ll continue to see us invest in the brand and continue to be part of the cultural zeitgeist.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Great. And final question for you, CapEx and capital allocation priorities. Your CapEx spend is $150,000,000 to $65,000,000 the last couple of years, but has been creeping up a little bit. What’s the right level for CapEx as a function of the needs of the business that you see today? And how should we be thinking about capital allocation?

Dave Gilboa, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: Yes. We don’t think there’ll be any material deviations from the trend that you’ve seen. We’ll continue to open stores, which require capital, but our stores are quite capital efficient. We continue to target paybacks in under twenty months. We also see opportunities to invest in technology and software and AI and we’ve always been a technology driven brand and that will continue.

And the new area of spend is around AI glasses. This is a massive new TAM and massive new opportunity. We feel fortunate to be partnering with Google and as part of our partnership that they will be covering some of our expenses to stand up these new products and that goes to both product development, but also the experience that we’ll be able to sell these glasses in our stores, new fixtures, the demo experience. We believe that our stores are the ideal environment for customers to come in and try on and demo this new category of products. And so that will require some spend, but a lot of that will be supported from Google.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Great. Well, with that, we’re out of time. Thank you, Neil. Thank you, Dave. And thanks for all the audience for tuning in.

Neil Blumenthal, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

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