How These French Founders Built A Warby Parker Competitor That's Even More Affordable

Forbes

2 days ago

T he three founders of Izipizi, a French eyewear company founded in 2010, are staring at a decades-old photo of themselves on an iPad in an office in New York. Now in their late 30s, Xavier Aguera, Charles Brun and Quentin Couturier are 17 in the image, taken six years before the lifelong friends launched the brand that now brings in nearly $60 million in annual revenue.
'We had no links to the eyewear industry,' says Aguera, rolling back the years. 'We had a common will to create a company one day, and a curiosity and capacity to listen to customers.' Adds Couturier, 'There were no sexy brands for people, and we decided to create a cool one.'
Founded in Paris in 2010 as See Concept, the affordable luxury brand—also known as masstige—was launched a few months after and an ocean away from Warby Parker, but the companies have distinctly different visions. Both sell premium readers, sunglasses and blue-light glasses for less (Izipizi's prices range from about $50 to $75, while Warby Parker starts at $95 and goes up) to chic customers who don't want to spend a fortune to see and be seen. But Warby Parker famously launched with a direct-to-consumer strategy, while See Concept opted for a brick-and-mortar approach. Both brands understood their customer—American consumers wanted the convenience of trying on glasses at home, while the French valued the in-store experience.
Warby Parker has obviously been more successful of the two—its revenue last year was $770 million—but the brand has never expanded beyond the United States and Canada. Izipizi saw itself more in the mold of Swatch, the inexpensive Swiss watch company founded in the early 1980s, that is now ubiquitous and includes such luxury brands as Omega, Breguet and Blancpain.
But that was not the dream when the three friends met as teenagers in Lyon, France, bonding over sports, partying and skiing on weekends. After graduating, they each went to business school in Paris and all left wanting to be entrepreneurs. They reunited at 23 to start a business initially offering self-service reading glasses in places like banks and hotels—similar to a communal pen attached to a chain at a post office.
'I had the idea at the beginning because my mom was always looking for her glasses in restaurants and banks,' says Couturier, who oversees sales in European, Asian and South American markets. 'She would say 'Could you help me to read? Give me your eyes.' Our tag line was 'Clear vision at your fingertips.''
They each invested around $6,500 each to get the business off the ground, and Aguera and Brun had also just won a prize from their business school which gave them access to bank loans. They borrowed an additional $260,000 in loans to launch and earned slightly more than that in sales in their first year. They doubled their revenue in 2011 and then grew again, to around $850,000 in sales, in 2012. Despite the consistent growth, it was not the success the trio had hoped it would be.
'We thought we could sell these all around the world to millions of places,' recalls Brun, who focuses on the company's sales in North America. 'The product was useful, but it was hard for people to understand the need and to convince places like banks and post offices.'
The first two years in the eyewear business showed trio that there was also untapped potential in the more traditional market of reading glasses. So they pivoted in an effort to 'reinvent reading glasses from conventional products to a sexy lifestyle and fashion product,' says Brun.
Clear Vision: 'As soon as we had the real reading glasses, we saw it was a success within a few days. We had to order quickly and said, 'Now let's sell it all over the world.'" Izipizi
They raised nearly $800,000 between two fundraising rounds in 2012 and 2013 from friends and family to support the new vision, which initially gave a minority equity share to two lead investors. Now working with a manufacturing company in Taiwan, they began selling their new glasses at trade shows to meet buyers and retailers from around the world. Their big break came when they launched in the luxury Parisian boutique Colette.
See Concept earned just under $4 million in revenue in 2013, also making a net profit for the first time. From then, the founders understood how to scale the brand. They started launching the product across Europe's most fashionable department stores and neighborhoods.
'Since the first day when we launched in Collette, Le Bon Marché, Selfridges and Harrods, it was a big surprise for customers,' Couturier says. 'They were very rich people who loved luxury brands and the good things.'
'We had French actors and celebrities saying, 'Oh, I bought this at Colette for 30 euros.',' Brun adds. 'As soon as we had the real reading glasses, we saw it was a success within a few days. We had to order quickly and said, 'Now let's sell it all over the world.' But our aim was to make sure we sold to the best stores all over the world.'
The following year, the company expanded their product line into sunglasses, and soon added kids' and sports eyewear. See Concept was still growing fast and the founders made another big decision—to rebrand with a new, memorable name that's a play on 'easy peasy.' They also launched a flagship store in Paris in September 2017.
'It's a great name, Izipizi,' says Aguera, who heads the brand's global marketing and brand strategy. 'It's a palindrome, which means you can read it from both sides. And when you say it out loud, you must say it with a smile.'
Izipizi continued to steadily increase its retail footprint until 2020, when the Covid pandemic forced shoppers to go online. They may not have wanted to go down the Warby Parker path, but lockdown changed the rules. 'At first we were really ashamed to sell online because our customers were complaining,' Brun remembers. 'We really had the boom on our website during Covid.'
Cool Britannia: King Charles III wearing Izipizi sunglasses on a 2024 trip to Samoa. Victoria Jones-Pool/Getty Images
Today, about 30% of Izipizi's sales come from e-commerce purchases. The largest portion of its revenue comes from stores in France, the U.S., and other parts of Europe including the U.K., Germany and Italy. Izipizi has leaned into collaborations with companies and stores, including Moleskine, the Museum of Modern Art and Parisian boutique Merci. The brand now has 20 of its own retail locations and is sold in 7,500 other retailers across 85 countries. Or, as Couturier says, 'Izipizi is everywhere you need glasses.'
In 2022, Aguera, Brun and Couturier bought out their minority shareholders and brought in New York-based private equity firm TowerBrook Capital Partners, which injected Izipizi with an estimated $45 million in capital for 25% of the company. The three founders now collectively own the other 75% divided equally. Last year, Izipizi hired Jonathan Crespo, who previously had a senior role at Oliver Peoples, the Los Angeles-based eyewear brand launched in the 1980s, as its first North America CEO. Since then, the founders have been eyeing a big expansion in the United States. Izipizi is already in department stores such as Bloomingdale's but is looking to launch its first American retail location in 2026.
Back in New York City, Aguera, Brun and Couturier, who have virtually only ever had one job in their entire lives with one another, have to leave to take a meeting with Bloomingdale's. A few blocks downtown, a woman hurriedly throws open the passenger side door of a car, almost causing her Izipizi sunglasses case to fall out.
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