Warby Parker

Sea Group

Warby Parker

Vertically integrated DTC eyewear — Warby Parker designs frames in-house, contracts manufacturing directly (cutting out the brand licensing middlemen), and sells directly to consumers through its website and owned retail stores. The $95 price point (later raised to $95-$195) eliminates the traditional retail markup chain.

Home Try-On program lets customers pick five frames to try for free before buying. Revenue comes from prescription glasses, sunglasses, contact lenses, and eye exams (offered in stores).

The company expanded from pure e-commerce into physical retail with 200+ stores, making it an omnichannel brand rather than purely online.

Sea Group

Sea runs three distinct businesses under one roof, and the genius of the structure is how they feed each other.

Garena is the gaming division. It develops and publishes games — most famously Free Fire, which Sea built itself after years of just licensing other people's games.

Free Fire launched in 2017 and became a phenomenon in emerging markets. It's a battle royale game optimized for low-end Android devices and slow internet connections.

Exactly the phone most people in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and India actually own. Garena makes money through in-game purchases — skins, characters, seasonal passes.

At its peak, Free Fire had over 100 million daily active users.

Shopee is the e-commerce marketplace. It operates like a hybrid of Amazon and eBay — sellers list products, buyers purchase, Sea handles payments, logistics coordination, and marketing.

Shopee makes money through advertising, transaction fees, and value-added services for sellers. It's now the dominant e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia and has a significant presence in Brazil.

SeaMoney is the fintech arm. It offers mobile wallets, digital payments, buy-now-pay-later, and banking services through MariBank in Singapore.

The pitch is simple: hundreds of millions of people in Southeast Asia are unbanked or underbanked. Give them a mobile wallet tied to their Shopee account and they'll use it for everything.

It's the super-app play, executed patiently.

Warby Parker

Neil Blumenthal lost a pair of glasses backpacking and couldn't believe replacing them cost $700. He mentioned this at Wharton Business School, where classmates Dave Gilboa, Andrew Hunt, and Jeffrey Raider were having the same reaction.

They dug into the economics and discovered that Luxottica — an Italian conglomerate most people have never heard of — owned Ray-Ban, Oakley, LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut, Pearle Vision, and the licensing rights for Chanel, Prada, and Versace. One company controlled the supply chain from design to retail and priced accordingly.

The four students launched Warby Parker in February 2010 with a simple website selling prescription glasses for $95 — about a quarter of what Luxottica charged. GQ called them "the Netflix of eyewear" before they'd shipped their 100th pair.

They hit their first-year sales target in three weeks and had a 20,000-person waitlist within 48 hours of launch.

Sea Group

Forrest Li moved from China to Singapore in 2005 to do his MBA at Stanford. He didn't go back.

In 2009, he founded Garena — which literally means 'Global Arena' — as an online gaming platform for Southeast Asia. The region was massively underserved.

Hundreds of millions of young, mobile-first users with low PC penetration but exploding smartphone adoption. Nobody was building for them.

Li saw that gap and went straight at it.

Garena started by licensing popular PC games — League of Legends, FIFA Online — and localizing them for markets like Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines. It was a straightforward licensing model, unglamorous, not the kind of thing that gets TechCrunch headlines.

But it worked. Garena quietly became the dominant gaming platform across Southeast Asia.

The company rebranded to Sea Limited in 2017 when it IPO'd on the New York Stock Exchange, raising $884 million. By then, Li had already launched Shopee in 2015 — an e-commerce marketplace — and SeaMoney, a digital payments and financial services arm, was taking shape.

Three businesses. One holding company.

The bet was that gaming would fund the others until they could stand on their own. That's exactly what happened.

Warby Parker

The DTC playbook: build a beautiful brand, price dramatically below incumbents, and tell a compelling story about why the old way was a rip-off. The Home Try-On program was brilliant viral marketing — people posted photos of themselves in five different frames on social media asking friends to vote.

"Buy a Pair, Give a Pair" philanthropy (one pair donated for every pair sold) gave the brand a social mission that resonated with millennials. Physical retail expansion gave customers who wanted to try before they buy a real store experience.

Celebrity endorsements and fashion magazine coverage positioned Warby Parker as a lifestyle brand, not just a discount option. Steady geographic expansion of stores into new markets, each store becoming a customer acquisition channel.

Sea Group

The counterintuitive move was using gaming to subsidize e-commerce. Most tech companies pick a lane.

Sea used Garena's cash flows — which were enormous when Free Fire was at its peak — to fund Shopee's aggressive, money-losing expansion. They didn't need to raise debt or dilute shareholders to burn cash in new markets.

The gaming division was basically an ATM.

Free Fire itself was a masterclass in product-market fit. Instead of porting a premium game to low-end markets and watching it fail, Sea built a battle royale game from scratch that ran on 1GB RAM Android phones with patchy 3G connections.

The game was optimized for exactly the hardware that 800 million people in emerging markets actually owned. Nobody else was doing that.

Shopee's growth hack was localization taken to an almost absurd degree. They didn't just translate the app.

They hired local teams in every market, ran country-specific campaigns, integrated local payment methods, and partnered with local logistics providers. In Brazil, they ran Shopee-branded motorbike delivery.

In Indonesia, they integrated with hundreds of local courier companies. The playbook was: be more local than the locals.

The final piece was the flywheel. A Garena user downloads Free Fire, spends money on in-game items using SeaMoney's wallet, then starts buying physical goods on Shopee with the same wallet.

Three products, one ecosystem, one user. That's the compounding effect Li was building toward from day one.

Warby Parker

Luxottica (now EssilorLuxottica after merging with the world's largest lens maker) remains a $90 billion behemoth with resources Warby Parker can't match. Post-IPO stock performance has been disappointing — shares fell over 70% from their 2021 highs as the DTC bubble deflated.

Physical retail expansion is capital-intensive and each store needs to reach profitability. Competition from dozens of DTC eyewear brands (Zenni, EyeBuyDirect, Pair Eyewear) that copied the model and often undercut Warby Parker on price.

Prescription eyewear requires optometrist involvement, which adds complexity and regulatory overhead compared to selling non-prescription consumer products. And the fundamental challenge of glasses: people only buy them every 1-3 years, making customer lifetime value dependent on retention across very long purchase cycles.

Sea Group

The post-pandemic collapse was brutal and nearly existential for the stock, if not the business. During COVID, Sea was the perfect story — gaming was up, e-commerce was up, digital payments were up.

The stock hit $372 in October 2021. Market cap touched $200 billion.

Sea was the most valuable company ever to come out of Southeast Asia.

Then the world opened back up. Free Fire's daily active users fell off a cliff as people left their homes again.

Garena had funded the empire, and now the empire's funding engine was broken. Sea lost its license to publish Free Fire in India after the Indian government banned Chinese-linked apps.

India had been a massive market. Gone overnight.

Sea responded by cutting costs aggressively — laying off staff, retreating from markets like France, Spain, Poland, and India where Shopee had expanded without yet reaching profitability. The stock fell from $372 to under $40 by early 2023.

A 90% drawdown. That's not a correction.

That's a reset.

The deeper challenge is structural. Shopee competes with Lazada (backed by Alibaba), TikTok Shop (which has exploded in Southeast Asia), and increasingly with Temu and Shein.

These are not small competitors. TikTok Shop in particular has disrupted the e-commerce landscape in Indonesia and Thailand faster than most analysts expected.

Sea has scale and local knowledge, but the fight for Southeast Asia's e-commerce market is far from over.

Warby Parker

Prescription eyeglasses starting at $95 including basic lenses — the product that broke the Luxottica pricing model. Home Try-On — pick five frames online, receive them in a box, try them at home for free, return what you don't want.

Progressive lenses and blue-light-filtering options for higher-end needs. Prescription and non-prescription sunglasses.

Scout contact lenses — Warby Parker's daily disposable contact lens brand. In-store eye exams with licensed optometrists.

Virtual Try-On using iPhone face-scanning technology to see frames on your face through the app.

Sea Group

Free Fire is the crown jewel — a mobile battle royale game with over 100 million daily active users at its peak, built specifically for low-end Android devices in emerging markets. It's been the most downloaded mobile game globally multiple times and remains dominant across Southeast Asia and Latin America despite declining from its COVID peak.

Shopee is Sea's e-commerce marketplace and the business with the highest long-term ceiling. It operates across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Taiwan, and Brazil.

It's consistently ranked the most-visited e-commerce site in Southeast Asia. The app includes livestream shopping, local seller tools, Shopee Pay, and Shopee Food in select markets.

SeaMoney — now operating as the financial services umbrella — includes ShopeePay (mobile wallet integrated with the Shopee checkout), SeaBank (a licensed digital bank in the Philippines and Indonesia), and MariBank (a digital bank in Singapore). The pitch is financial inclusion for the underbanked, backed by transaction data from Shopee.

Warby Parker

Pre-IPO investors included General Catalyst, Tiger Global Management, T. Rowe Price, Durable Capital Partners, and D1 Capital Partners.

The company went public on the NYSE in September 2021 via direct listing.

Sea Group

Sea went public in 2017 without needing a late-stage mega-round from the usual suspects. But it had institutional backing from early on.

Tencent is the most significant external shareholder — the Chinese gaming giant held a roughly 22% stake at various points, which gave Sea both credibility in gaming and a complicated geopolitical headache as anti-China sentiment grew in Southeast Asia and the U.S.

Naveen Tewari's General Atlantic and other growth equity funds participated in rounds before the IPO. Post-IPO, Sea attracted attention from large institutional investors including T.

Rowe Price, BlackRock, and various sovereign wealth funds drawn to the Southeast Asia growth story.

Masayoshi Son's SoftBank also took a stake — consistent with SoftBank's bet on emerging market consumer internet platforms. The Tencent relationship is the most interesting one because it's both a competitive asset (access to gaming IP and distribution) and a liability (political risk in markets sensitive to Chinese corporate influence).