🔴 The weird case of dedigitalization innovation

There is a current trend that is the most post-2018 you can imagine. Pure players that disrupted a market by becoming cloud- or online-only suddenly rematerialize and invest in brick-and-mortar. In a seemingly non-sensical turn-around whole crop of digital natives seem to rediscover the wheel.

I call this dedigitalization innovation.

One of the posterchild of this backward revolution is certainly Warby Parker. The once famous disruptor that wanted to cut all the middlemen between you and a pair of affordable, good-quality prescription glasses (or contact lenses) now has upward of 200 stores in the U.S. and Canada. And these stores are not a fluke; they generate 60% of their sales.

A by-the-book disruptor, the company is now just another regular Joe business.

Or is it?