How to Prepare for Overwhelming Success

Warby Parker: A Case Study

Most discussion around early business difficulties centers around what to do if there is too little interest in your service or product. Very rarely does it touch on what to do if your product is too successful and you are having trouble managing that success.

Warby Parker was the first online retailer of prescription glasses. They gained popularity because of their inexpensive prices compared to traditional optometrist glasses. In their interview with the podcast How I Built That, the founders discuss their biggest struggles with starting their website.

Warby Parker launched their website without advertising or trying to get publicity at all. Against their wildest expectations, dozens and dozens of orders piled in from people trying to get these glasses. However, they ran into a major problem because of this massive influx of orders. They had no way of tracking inventory through the site or waitlist functionality. This meant that most of these people were buying glasses that the founders had no way of producing, and there was no way of telling them that.

Eventually, the founders were able to add inventory and waitlist functions to their website, but not before they had gained a waitlist so long it took them over 9 months to resolve, resulting in lost revenue. They had to sacrifice sleep and class time to make sure that every customer email was answered in a timely manner. The founders became their own customer service, sales, and management teams without breaks.

Project management can help prepare for every possibility, good and bad. Led by a project management team, this problem could have been spotted early and dealt with without putting as much pressure on the founders. A brainstorming session before the website went live could have pointed out how important inventory tracking and waitlisting features are and made a plan to get those in before the launch. They could have also done some market research to gauge interest and the best prices before moving forward with inventory ordering and website design. Project management considers all these courses of action and puts them into action to prevent issues that would halt the growth of your company.

To use your resources to their fullest potential, you need to plan for the scenario where there is too much interest as well as not enough. Doing so will prevent much stress and anxiety.