How eyewear company Zenni has tackled the market problem with tech
Zenni hasn’t always been the trendy eyewear brand sported by Rashida Jones in New York subway ads — in fact, like many tech companies, it was founded by a couple of ambitious scientists in a garage.
“We have a tendency of getting nerds in the company,” said Bai Gan, chief product officer at Zenni, who was trained as a physicist.
It also hasn’t always had an easy, consumer-facing website.
“The internal joke is that our website was built for opticians, not customers,” Gan said with a chuckle.
But with the outbreak of COVID-19 and subsequent shelter-in-place orders, Zenni saw a bit of a shift.
“Our business in general as a D2C brand … has skyrocketed over the last 30 days since we’ve all been sheltered in place,” said Sean Pate, Zenni’s brand communications officer.
According to the company, business was up 50% year-over-year in April as people turned to the internet for their shopping during the COVID-19 crisis.
“People are desperate to look for solutions online,” Gan said. “We’re seeing that next tier of people … spontaneously converted to online purchasing of prescription eyewear.”
Only about 10% of prescription glasses sales were online in 2018, he said, so it’s still not mainstream, but closures from the coronavirus have shepherded shoppers to digital solutions. In response to increased demand, Zenni has been trying to make adjustments for customers who aren’t as digitally-native as its typical buyers.
“We’re on a road to simplification. Historically, Zenni has catered to a customer that was ready to invest the time into an involved experience,” Pate said. “This is where our challenge is to capture and migrate the classic retail customer.”
As part of that effort, Zenni is preparing a team of optometrists from University of California, Berkeley to help the next wave of consumers. The virtual try-on tool (VTO) has been a big asset, Gan said, and he hopes that the checkout process can be simplified down to a few clicks within the next year.
“Instead of having you go through a catalogue of 3,000 styles, AI has been incorporated in our site so that, based on purchasing history, based on your VTO and your face shape, your picture or the video of your face, we could guide you through the process, which can be a little difficult for first-timers,” he said.
Technology has been vital in adapting to demand (besides recouping business from other brick-and-mortar retailers in the first place), but it has also been one of the drivers of that demand for the eyewear company. Zenni has been promoting its Blokz lenses, which are designed to block some of the blue light emitted from screens.
“Now, depending on your role professionally, we’re all forced in front of our digital devices, whether it’s for time-wasting entertainment or professional communication, and that is giving people increased levels of symptoms but increased awareness of these things,” Pate said, referring to the symptoms that some people feel after prolonged exposure to blue light, including head aches, eye pain and trouble sleeping.
“The basic scientific principal underlying it is that the shorter the wavelengths, the higher the energy. So violet light or UV light is actually higher energy than red light,” Gan explained. Zenni’s Blokz lenses block wavelengths at and below 420 nm, which includes the part of the visible light spectrum adjacent to ultraviolet light (UV). But blue light is not all bad, Gan said.
“Blue light is actually needed for circadian rhythms, waking you up, and also just for avoiding color distortion,” Gan said. It’s the overexposure (perhaps from screens) that can cause the negative effects.
That’s part of the reason why Zenni initially targeted the gaming community with Blokz.
“We may spend a few hours — maybe four, five, six hours — on our computers; gamers are on upwards of 10 and laser-focused on it,” Pate said.
But in the few years since Blokz hit the market, they have grown to account for about 25% of Zenni’s business, Gan said.
“The clarity is really the consumer breakthrough on the mass adoption of these lenses,” said Pate, referencing the yellow-tinted gamer goggles of old. “That is the effective application for folks that don’t even need a prescription pair of glasses. I’m wearing them now — I do every day — just to protect my eyes from fatigue and all the symptoms that go along with your day to day consumption of blue light.”
“My daughter does it too,” Gan said. “So she’s taking online classes at home … I was able to scare her enough to motivate her to wear them in front of screens all the time.”
In an effort to continue the growth of blue light-blocking lenses, Zenni has a partnership with designer Cynthia Rowley, who is creating fashionable frames to pair with the Blokz lenses. Blokz can already been partnered with most Zenni frames, as each pair of glasses is custom-made after order.
Pate is confident that even after it is safe for stores to re-open, Zenni will continue to see interest in its online, direct-to-consumer model, especially because of its pricing.
“I think we’re going to see that continue given the fallouts from [COVID-19] even when we’re back circulating in society because of the unemployment rate; people have lost their insurance,” Pate said. Zenni offers customized medical devices for an affordable price, he said, and that’s what people need when times are tough.
