Warby Parker Chose to Build, Not Buy, Its Doctor Tools

For the last two years, retailers have heard one message about AI: move fast. Warby Parker’s fireside chat at eTail Boston made a narrower case. Sometimes the fastest path is the one you build yourself.

Sandy Gilsenan is Chief Retail & Customer Officer at Warby Parker. She discussed that build-first instinct with Jill Manoff, Editor in Chief of Glossy & Modern Retail. The topic was electronic health records, a subject with no obvious retail glamour. But the story underneath it explained a lot about how Warby Parker scales.

A vendor would have taken six months. Warby Parker took a couple.

Gilsenan described a company with over 550 doctors, whose daily workflows depend on software most customers never see. Rather than license an existing EHR platform, Warby Parker built its own. The team piloted it in a small set of stores in March and rolled it out to every exam suite by June. Gilsenan said a third-party vendor would have needed six months or more to deliver the same thing.

The speed wasn’t really the point. The in-house build gave Warby Parker something a vendor couldn’t: direct access to doctor feedback, folded into the product while the team built it. Focus groups, time in the exam suites, and direct reviews of design choices with doctors shaped the platform from the inside. Gilsenan said adoption was high because doctors had a stake in the product and a voice in it.

Dark mode came from a doctor, not a product team

One detail made the point concrete. Doctors asked for the exam room lighting to shift into dark mode, and Warby Parker built it in. It’s a small feature, but it’s evidence of a build process where clinical staff shaped the tool rather than adapting to it. Guided in-app tours, added as the doctor roster grew alongside new stores, let new hires self-train without pulling senior staff away from patients.

The same build-it-yourself instinct shows up on the customer side. Warby Parker’s virtual try-on tool, which Gilsenan called her personal favorite feature, lets shoppers see frames on their own face from multiple angles. A newer recommendation tool uses a face scan to size frames to a customer’s face and eye placement. That narrows choices in an online catalog that could otherwise feel overwhelming.

Prescription upload tools cut friction at checkout. None of it replaces the in-store optician, in Gilsenan’s framing. It’s meant to bring the confidence of in-store service into an online purchase.

Store growth and doctor access are the same growth strategy

Warby Parker opened 47 stores in 2025 and is on track for 50 in 2026, its highest count yet. That growth brings the fleet past 350 locations across the U.S. and Canada. Gilsenan was direct about why store count and eye exam access are tied together. Product and care depend on each other, so new stores increasingly launch with exam capability built in.

Older locations are getting the same treatment retroactively. Warby Parker closed its Buckhead store for six weeks to add eye exam capability and a family test suite. Those features didn’t exist when the store first opened.

Its North Park Dallas location, one of the brand’s strongest performers, is currently closed for a renovation that will add exams throughout. Gilsenan said the company is on a clear path toward 900 stores, building exam access into that expansion instead of adding it later.

The payoff, according to Gilsenan, shows up in loyalty. Customers who get exams from Warby Parker doctors come back for checkups and contact lenses. That turns a single transaction into a recurring clinical relationship. It’s a different kind of retention than most eyewear retailers can claim.

Intelligent Eyewear arrives this holiday season

The session’s forward-looking moment was Warby Parker’s first Intelligent Eyewear, built with Google and Samsung and targeted for a holiday launch. Gilsenan described a product built for all-day wear. It combines Warby Parker’s design language with AI features for communication, navigation, and app interaction, all without a phone screen.

Gilsenan expects a mixed rollout. Some existing customers will adopt slowly. A new, technology-curious customer may visit Warby Parker for the first time because of the product rather than the frames. She was careful not to frame it as a replacement for the core business.

Retail still matters, she said. A human optician who adjusts a frame so it doesn’t slide down someone’s face is hard to replace.

What this means for senior marketers

Warby Parker’s session offered a case study more than a prediction. Infrastructure decisions and customer-facing products can share the same build philosophy when a company treats the feedback loop as the product itself. For marketers weighing buy-versus-build calls of their own, the lesson was that ownership of the feedback loop is often worth more than the vendor’s timeline.