It was just mayhem

- My name's Dave Gilboa, co-founder and co-CEO of Warby Parker. - I'm Neil Blumenthal, co-founder and co-CEO of Warby Parker. Warby Parker just took off like a rocket ship. We hit our first year sales targets in three weeks, sold out of our top 15 styles in four weeks, had a wait list of 20000 people. We were completely overwhelmed. - [Dave] We were full time students and we didn't have any employees, we didn't have an office. We're working at our apartments and we'd worked so hard to get our website up that I think naively we thought once it was up, we could relax a little bit and all of a sudden just order started pouring in. - It was just mayhem. We basically had to stop going to class, so that way we could answer customer calls or respond to customer emails. We didn't even have sold out functionality on the website. So one of the first calls, Dave calls our developers like we gotta figure this out. We made a decision early on that we were gonna be transparent with our customers and actually explain to them what's going on that we are really sorry but we've ran out of inventory. A core tenet of ours is just to always be truthful and honest, and if you do that hopefully customers will like it and be grateful for that. - [Dave] I think we learned two important lessons right around launch, one is that if you treat customers well good things will happen. We personally reached out to every one of those customers and we gave away a lot of free glasses for people if we messed up their order or kept them waiting for a certain amount of time. If you're just honest and transparent with customers and show them that you care that goes a really long way. And the second thing is just the power of serendipity and good luck. One of our first customers called in, we'd taken about three weeks to get him his glasses and at the time our customer service line just went directly to all the four founder cell phones. - [Neil] Whoever would answer first got the customer. - And our co-founder Jeff picked up the phone and profusely apologized and said," we're overwhelmed by demand. "We'll give you a free pair of glasses go "to our website pick out another pair we'll send that "for free I'll package it myself and send it out tomorrow." And he said, "Well it sounds like you're having "some logistics problems maybe I can help. "I'm the CEO of a publicly traded logistics company." And the next week they were our logistics partner and we still work with them today, where they handle all our logistics.