This is Scale & Strategy, your BizOps field report. We give you the rundown so you don’t miss the next run-up.
Here’s what we got for you today:
AI traffic just jumped 527%. Here’s the play.
How Warby Parker’s $95 Glasses Survived 15 Years of Inflation, Tariffs, and Everyone Else Blinking First
AI traffic just jumped 527%. Here’s the play.
Forget the old SEO game of “optimize, wait, crawl, rank.” That playbook is a museum piece now.
Previsible pulled GA4 data across 19 sites and the signal is loud: people are finding content through AI, not just Google. Between Jan and May 2025, AI-driven sessions spiked 527%. Some sites are already seeing 1%+ of their traffic from LLMs alone.
And here’s the kicker — LLMs don’t work on Google’s slow timelines. They surface your stuff instantly if it’s good… and ghost you if it’s not.
So, here’s how to get in the feed instead of watching from the bench:
1. Track AI traffic yesterday. Even if attribution is messy, you need directional data. UTM tag AI platforms, watch for weird spikes, and annotate the hell out of them. Treat AI like a new top-of-funnel channel, because it is.
2. Write for the robot skimmer. LLMs aren’t ranking — they’re picking winners. They love clear, direct, useful content with tight structure, bullet points, and subheadings. If it reads like a half-hour warmup, you’re invisible.
3. Swap “ranking” for “being selected.” Who cares if you’re #1 on Google if the user never gets there? Audit your space. Who’s the model quoting? Why? Steal the format and tone that’s winning.
4. AI-ready everything. LLMs pull from everything — product pages, onboarding copy, case studies. Not just your blog. If every corner of your site isn’t optimized for being cited, you’re leaving money on the table.
This isn’t “the future of search.” It’s now. Keep playing 2022 SEO, and you’ll miss the traffic that’s already here — just coming from a different door.
5 apps for tasks. 3 for docs. 2 for chat. All confusing. ClickUp gets you back to focus with one app that handles it all—tasks, docs, AI, whiteboards, automation, dashboards.
How Warby Parker’s $95 Glasses Survived 15 Years of Inflation, Tariffs, and Everyone Else Blinking First
Warby Parker has pulled off a rare trick in consumer goods: holding the line on price for a decade and a half while the rest of the DTC class quietly hiked theirs. Since 2010, their cheapest pair of glasses has been $95. No “for a limited time” footnote, no quiet adjustments. Just $95.
Compare that to other 2010s-era disruptors who built their hype on affordability. Naadam’s “$75 sweater” now goes for $98. Casper’s $500 twin mattress? $749 today. The post-pandemic reality for most is price creep — inflation, tariffs, and payroll pressure making the “we’re cheaper” pitch harder to keep alive.
Warby’s taking a different path. Even with Trump-era tariffs now in play, they’re keeping the entry price frozen and instead raising margins at the top end — higher-priced frames, premium lenses, and progressive prescriptions for the 40+ crowd who will happily pay for them. It’s a margin mix shift, not a universal hike.
That’s a break from competitors like National Vision, which recently raised its flagship 2-for-1 deal twice in two years, from $79.95 to $89.95. As their CEO admitted, “Seventeen years for one price is a long time.” Warby seems intent on proving it can be longer.
Part of the advantage comes from control. They own two U.S. optical labs, run their own stores, and sell direct online — letting them dodge some middleman markups and tariff hits. They’re also moving frame production away from China: 20% of cost of goods came from there in early 2025, and they’re aiming for under 15% by year’s end.
The numbers still work. Q2 revenue jumped 14% year-over-year to $214.5M, though tariffs did nick gross margin from 56.1% to 54.3%. And while 60% of their ~300 frames online are still $95, the average revenue per customer has climbed every year since their IPO in 2021 — proof that plenty of shoppers trade up for style or tech (think $195 Montague frames with blue-light filters, as one recent buyer did).
Warby also isn’t shy about adding higher-ticket temptations: better progressive lenses, new frame designs, and accessories like clip-on sunglasses that slot right into top-selling styles.
The strategy is clear — keep the halo price untouched, make it easy to walk in at $95, then let design, prescription complexity, and accessories do the upselling. And with name-brand competitors’ markups so high, Warby can raise select prices and still sit comfortably as the “value” option.
Will $95 survive forever? Co-CEO Neil Blumenthal isn’t promising.
“We may have to increase that price at some point, but we’re going to do everything possible for as long as possible to not.”
Translation: they’ll break before they bend — but not anytime soon.
