Warby Parker has no right trading at 4x Revenue with 8% YoY growth running $100m share buy backs. Someone is asleep at the wheel.

+ Write a Quarterly Update

You’ll here this advice from incredibly successful founder who have raised money and scaled businesses.

Always write quarterly updates summarizing your progress, what you worked on and what your focus for next quarter is.

Send it to people you trust and would want to get feedback from.

Even if you write it to yourself. Build the email and send it. The value of doing this is similar to journalling or writing Quarterly analysis.

Every quarter I write our investors an update on:

It takes 3 hours to pull all the data and write the email and it’s a Top 5 most valuable activity of the quarter.

If you don’t already send these updates start this quarter. If you feel comfortable send them to me. Happy to help where I can, but more importantly so you start writing them.

Note: As always, none of what follows is legal, tax, investing, financial, or any other sort of advice. And I was never here 😉.

Warby Parker's (the DTC poster child disrupting the monopolistic eyewear market) has grown up to realize they need to become everything they set out to fight.

They aren’t playing as well or with as many resources and are caught in the awkward middle.

Link to Warby Parker's FY 2025 earnings: SEC EDGAR 10-K

What do you expect when you buy back $100M in stock vs. investing $67m in retail capex in the same year. 

This is a crime for an early stage biz. They should have put the full $167m into the CAPEX engine that;s firing. Not propping up their over inflated stock.

They aren’t growing fast or profitable. It’s only a matter of time before this stock hits a wall.

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Founded:

Aha Moment:

Growth:

Model:

Where We Are Now:

Here are the 3 ways we get Warby Parker back to growth and be a $6B stock.

I hate this buyback. $100M to shrink the share count while retail capex, the one engine that's actually working, gets $67M?

There’s an easy case to fund more Warby Parker owned stores.

At the current $1.4M/store implied capex rate, that's ~71 more doors on top of the 50 already planned for 2026. 

If we use the blended Rev avg at $2.7M rev/store, that's ~$192M in run-rate rev, worth roughly $576M in EV at a 3x rev multiple.

How on God’s green earth is buying back $100m in stock increase the stock price more than adding $576m from Retail sales growth?

That’s before we get to the bigger opportunity. Expanding into Target Optical.

Retail is working for Warby. But they’re buying back stock???? 

Seems like the pencil pushers have invaded the board.

Takeaway: Growth brands don’t buy back stock. That’s for bizs that ran out of ideas.

This is my favorite move in the whole issue. Liscence the famous glasses from your favorite characters.

They've already run a Marvel Spider-Man 2 collection drop. 

Luxottica owns the luxury eyewear brands. Warby can own your favorite characters frames:

Limited drops with built in pricing power since someone will spend more for their favorite characters. Halloween would become its own shopping event.

Every time a movie comes out drop the relevant line. Kids will go crazy for it and Mom/Dad will have to get the matching pair.

At Warby’s price point the fastest way to grow is convincing customers they need to buy 3-4 pairs for fashion. Vs 1 great pair that last year.

Takeaway: Become the Hasbro of glasses.

The eyewear insurance market is a complete monopoly. To quickly explain the player when a consumer wants to buy a pair of glasses. TL;DR Luxxottica currently owns it all.

Warby has been rebuilding components:

Warby’s efforts to go direct to insurance providers is working. Insurance related rev is <20% of overall, but +40% YoY, but EyeMed (owned by Luxottica) + VSP, the two biggest networks in the country, are still closed to them. 

Warby doesn’t have time to wait out the the pending antitrust suit alleging EyeMed steers patients straight to Luxottica's own stores. 

Instead of waiting through the slog Warby can go direct to employers and benefits administrators instead. Skip the insurance providers entirely and work with the companies providing the direct value to consumers. 

If that unlocks even 15-20% more growth on top of the existing insurance trajectory, that's $15-20M in incremental rev, roughly $45-60M in EV. And this model is a lock in where over a decade it compounds and will become a main drivers of their rev.

Takeaway: You can't build a moat renting space in your rival's castle.

Warby Parker is living its own Dark Knight feeling (Die a hero of live long enough to see yourself become a villain). 

Last year they killed Home Try-On, because it wasn't profitable. 

Literally the tactic that launched the brand, DTC and everyone’s faith that you can disrupt the legacy incumbent with free shipping and returns.

Is now officially dead.

It’s nice every once in a while to take a victory lap. Almost exactly a year ago I said they’d have to pick. Retail expansion or running all of the DTC value props. And Bullet point #1 was the Try at home program.

The scrappy disruptor is now:

I’m not disagreeing with any of these tactics. 

Insurance partnerships are the right move.

Retail is where most consumers buy glasses.

Google or Samsung would be an incredible home. 

This brand isn’t growing or profitable anymore to take on the 10k lb elephant in the market.

The Try at Home tactic that got them here clearly wasn’t going to get them to where they need to be.

Neither will $100m buybacks, but that’s why we should be the captain now.