Heywear Is Looking to Democratize the Prescription Eyewear Experience
It’s an on-demand world: food, film, fashion — nearly every consumer product — is hours, if not minutes, away. So why not prescription eyewear? That’s the thinking at Heywear, the eyewear brand that’s putting prescription lenses in customers’ hands within an hour of them walking through the door.
Since the first store launched in downtown Manhattan in 2021, Heywear has been blending its proprietary technology with experiential retail to speed what has traditionally been a clunky process involving booking and sitting for an eye exam, choosing lenses, and then waiting for days, and sometimes weeks, for it to be filled.
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Warby Parker was an early disruptor, taking the process online and streamlining it to a degree. Then came the hipster eyewear retailers, offering flat fees for exams and frames, but prescriptions still took time to be filled.
Heywear is looking to accelerate, and democratize, the entire process. With its speedy software, on-site labs and flat price of $99 for an exam, a set of frames and lenses, it wants to get people into the habit of having their eyes checked regularly and treating glasses as a fashion accessory.
Courtesy of Heywear
“We’re focused on making the process of buying prescription eyewear the same as buying a pair of jeans. We want to make it more accessible, and make it an impulse buy for the first time ever,” said the chief executive officer Jaclyn Pascocello in an interview.
Pascocello said the cost of new lenses often puts people off getting their eyes checked and updating their prescriptions.
“Americans will often get a pair of prescription glasses once every 24 months, because it’s often complicated, and takes a long time. So for us, it’s been important to focus on accessibility, ease and simplicity.
“Also, a lot of people don’t have insurance, and they walk around not being able to see the world as clearly as they as they need to. We should be taking care of our eyes the way we take care of our teeth, which is why our entire model is focused on one visit, one price, no surprises,” she said.
Heywear relies on proprietary software that was built in-house and which groups the eye exam, lens-making, fitting and delivery under the same roof. Appointments are done and glasses are dispatched between 30 and 60 minutes of a customer walking through the door of the shop.
Courtesy of Heywear
Heywear has two locations in New York City — a flagship located at Lafayette Street and Bond Street and a store in downtown Brooklyn.
A third unit is set to open near the Flatiron building, at 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue, at the beginning of April.
By June, Heywear will have five New York City locations, including soon-to-open shops in Williamsburg and the Upper East Side.
The flagship store spans 2,500 square feet over two floors. Customers can pre-book an appointment or walk in, try on and choose a pair of lenses that have been designed in-house. They can either hand over an existing prescription, or sit for a comprehensive eye exam.
Pascocello said customers can pick up their glasses almost immediately after the exam.
Heywear’s “hyper-local” model means that it can house the lab and the inventory at each flagship store. Those flagships are then used as manufacturing and fulfillment centers for the smaller stores.
“The most proprietary thing about us is the lab model, and being able to scale it,” she said, adding that the labs are small, about 250 square feet in size.
One of Heywear’s cofounders is a French software engineer called Alexandre Jais, who’s had poor vision since he was a child, Pascocello said. “So this project is something that’s very close to his heart. All of the software build came from him and his team.”
In addition to being a cofounder, Jais is Heywear’s chief technology officer.
Traditionally, retail opticians rely on a few labs scattered around the country, which means that waiting times between the eye exam and the delivery can be long because of the volume of orders made, and the time it takes to ship.
Pascocello said Heywear’s demographic is broad, although Heywear does not do children’s glasses or cater to the under-18 crowd. “The majority of our customers are in that 18 to 40 range, but we see people of all ages, all ages coming and getting excited about the frames that we have in the end, the ease and the accessibility and affordability. And with the e-comm we see people of all age ranges from all over the country buying glasses.”
Heywear offers around 50 styles and a variety of colors, for a total of around 175 options. Heywear also releases limited editions alongside its seasonal collections. The spring 2022 collection will land at the end of April. Customers can shop for frames online, too, although Pascocello said Heywear’s focus now is on physical retail.
“We see our customers coming back within the first six months of their first purchase and buying multiple pairs at the same time,” Pascocello said.
The company launched a beta store in 2019 and opened its first retail operation, the Lafayette and Bond store, in 2021. It is backed by venture capital and the team is preparing to raise Series A funding in the coming months. Investment will be put toward further retail expansion, and the next big city is Miami, where Heywear is looking to open in the second half of this year.
Pascocello said the company has big ambitions in the U.S.
“Ideally we’d like to be within an hour of most Americans in the next five to 10 years. It’s a lofty goal, but we’re very excited,” she said. “I will always believe in retail. It’s incredibly important to cities, bringing people what they need, close to where they are. And we really want to be inclusive, making sure that everyone has access to glasses, and an experiential retail experience.”
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