Rapid Response: How Warby Parker is making decisions in uncertainty, with CEO Neil Blumenthal

**Neil Blumenthal** (0:00)
COVID has impacted every part of our business, and it's impacted every aspect of every business. The most challenging thing about the COVID crisis has been the amount of uncertainty. Businesses do not thrive in uncertainty. The number one priority is the health and safety of your team, and as a leader, that's what I care most about. It's interesting that prior to COVID, it's rare that you'd ever really talk about health and safety because that was always a given. And now it's just been a lot more front and center because it is so much at risk here.
For a company like Warby Parker, how do we invest through the crisis so that way we emerge stronger than ever and capture even greater market share than we would have otherwise?
I'm not stressed about the long-term viability of Warby Parker. I'm not stressed about our ability to overcome this and emerge stronger than ever.

**Bob Safian** (1:02)
That was Neil Blumenthal, co-founder and co-CEO of Warby Parker. Warby has been a poster child for direct-to-consumer startup success, upending the prescription glasses industry. But as Neil acknowledges, the pandemic has impacted every part of their business. I'm Bob Safian, former editor of Fast Company, founder of the Flux Group, and host of Masters of Scale, Rapid Response. I wanted to talk to Neil because Warby Parker straddles two operations facing opposing pressures, a chain of 120 stores that was shuttered by COVID-19 lockdown and an online retail arm that's thriving. Neil and his co-CEO, Dave Gilbao, find themselves rethinking everything about the customer and employee experience, online and off, even as they struggle to determine which physical stores to reopen and when.
Neil asserts that this coronavirus crisis will accelerate the adoption of new habits by three to five years, and he's determined to turn that to his company's advantage.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:21)
We'll start the show in a moment, after a word from our premier brand partner, Capital One Business.

**Chris Renner** (2:28)
I was sitting at the dinner table with my wife Shannon, and I said, honey, we're gonna start a construction company. And she said, sweetie, you don't swing a hammer.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:40)
That's Chris Renner, founder of Pinnacle Companies, the largest builder of vacation homes in Breckenridge, Colorado, a destination for skiers worldwide.
At the time, he was a management consultant advising a local construction company. And it occurred to him that a hammer might not be the most essential tool.

**Chris Renner** (2:56)
In my conversations with the owner, I said, does everybody do it like this? And he said, my tools haven't changed in 40 years. And I'm looking at him thinking, oh man, they should.
I was thinking laptops in the field and webcams and real-time communication and what I was watching was the shuffling of papers in the front seat of a pickup truck. And I just thought, there's such a better way to do this.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:28)
Chris had a spark of inspiration that he couldn't ignore. And even though we had no construction experience, he set out to upend the way the industry operated. What he didn't realize was that the business he was setting out to create would be much more than a construction company.
We'll hear how he did it later in the show. It's all part of Capital One Business' Spotlight on Entrepreneurs following Reid's Refocus Playbook at all levels of scale. Today's Playbook Insight, focus on the business behind your business.

**Bob Safian** (4:00)
I'm Bob Safian, and I'm here with Neil Blumenthal, co-founder and co-CEO of Warby Parker, the retailer of prescription glasses and sunglasses, and more recently, contact lenses. In the pandemic, many consumers have boosted their reliance on online shopping.
Warby Parker's business started as direct consumer, but now sits on both sides, mixing online and in-store. It's always been a tricky dance, but now it's gotten even more so. Neil is coming to us today from Long Island, New York, as I asked my questions from my home in Brooklyn. Neil, thanks for joining us.

**Neil Blumenthal** (4:37)
Thanks for having me.

**Bob Safian** (4:39)
So tell me how the coronavirus first came to your attention and the initial impact on your business.

**Neil Blumenthal** (4:48)
So we started talking about it as a company in November, December, and we were looking at it really as a potential disruption to our supply chain. So we created a task force. We were really worried that this was going to impact some of our frame manufacturers in China and Japan and also be problematic from a transportation standpoint. So we actually started to pull up inventory to get it stateside in case there were any issues.
Lo and behold, that morphed the crisis went from a transportation supply chain issue to a health and safety issue for our employees and our customers and a potential customer demand issue.