Warby Parker‘s stock is up about 6% since the eyewear provider went public last month. Some analysts said the company has found its niche in the optical retail sector.
Warby Parker’s (ticker: WRBY) growth is being fueled by the success of its bricks-and-mortar stores and an aging population in need of affordable optical retailers.
“How I think about Warby Parker is that they’ve completely cut out all the middlemen,” said Loop Capital Markets analyst Anthony Chukumba. “Essentially, they’re designing their own glasses, their own brands and then they’re directly sourcing those brands.”
Chukumba also said the company has been successful in navigating their bricks-and-mortar sales. Consumers find the stores vibrant, he said, a bit different from buying glasses directly in the optometrist’s office.
Shopping for glasses online is a challenge, he said, so having both e-commerce options and in-store options has proved fruitful.
Store visits were up 32.4% in July, 19.2% in August, and 25.4% in September, from the same months in 2019, according to data compiled by Pacer.ai.
Warby Parker “is one of the first direct-to-consumer companies that proved the traditionally brick-and-mortar-driven eyewear industry can go digital, and the company continues to push the boundaries of traditional vision care through virtual vision testing, virtual eyeglass try-ons and telehealth,” Cowen analyst Oliver Chen wrote in a research note.
He wrote that the stock is a Buy, but that’s somewhat contingent on whether or not Warby Parker expands its store footprint. Both analysts noted this as a possible risk.
“The oligopolistic nature of the U.S. eyewear market carries highbarriers to entry and could pose extreme challenges to WRBY’s path to becoming a holistic vision company,” Chen wrote.
Some of those risks also include whether or not Warby Parker can continue to execute store roll outs and if competitors offer lower prices.
The stock fell 2.5% to $57.53 on Tuesday. The S&P 500 index rose 0.2%