Warby Parker's frame selection is limited though. They mostly only have large, heavy plastic frames, and the few wire frames they have are still huge. None of their frames suit my preferences or my prescription.

I prefer smaller, traditional wire frames because that's what I've always worn (and at this stage in life that's unlikely to change). Unfortunately, wire frames seem to be out of fashion and no-one seems to have a good selection.

Furthermore, I have a fairly strong prescription and with my current frames, the lenses are about 8 mm thick at the edges, and my frames are the smallest I could find. The larger the frame, the thicker the lenses end up being. I could go with a higher-index lens material, but then chromatic aberrations become way too distracting, and I'd rather have a thicker lens than deal with that again.

P.S. Those "rare" scenarios you refer to are not that rare. My mother gets her glasses from WP, and they end up costing several hundred Canadian dollars, about the same as Costco. My mother's prescription is also not that strong or unusual; like most or a lot of old people, she is both near-sighted and far-sighted, and while bifocals might be an option, most people seem to prefer transition lenses (I think that's what they're called).

Zenni has a good selection of wire frames. I too prefer them. Large lenses are very big at the edges, since I have a strong RX. Plastic frames always feel like their sliding down my face.

Wish I could find glasses with ear hooks. They only make them for kids now.

I always bend the arms down to hook my ears tighter. I work a lot on my hands and knees (trim carpentry), and there's nothing more annoying than my glasses swinging back and forth on my face.

I have heavy lenses, wish I could find cable-temples for adults.

Any chance you could describe chromatic aberrations? I’ve had some vision frustrations, and I feel like perhaps you’ve just described what I have. So did sticking with the thicker lenses help? Rather than the thinner? (I have a very high prescription as well, and I’ve always had the thinner lenses.)

The aberration I see when I wear glasses are most obvious when looking at something like colored LED lighting - I can actually cleanly separate the red and blue components of a purple light into two separate images, for instance. More blended colors will just get the usual fringe.

That, along with the other severe distortion brought on by a -10 diopter, is why I mainly wear contacts now.

Rainbow fringes around light sources, particularly low-quality LEDs. Aberrations are minimal at the centre of the lens, but progressively get worse toward the edges (which is why contact lenses don't suffer from this problem). Driving at night became a nightmare, especially with LED headlights. I'd see cop cars out of the corner of my eyes everywhere when LED headlights would appear blue and strobe through a centre median. It didn't really bother me that much during the day though. For reference, I have diopters of -8.25 and -9.

I still have high-index lenses, but ones with a lower index of refraction and therefore a higher Abbe number. I don't remember specifically which material I have, but I think it might be high index 1.6 (index of refraction) with an Abbe number of 42. Chromatic aberrations are minimal enough with these lenses that they don't bother me much anymore (although still present).

For comparison, crown glass and CR-39 plastic have Abbe numbers of about 58, but will result in much thicker lenses at stronger prescriptions. Regular high index plastic lenses have the some of the worst Abbe numbers, and the higher index you go the worse it gets (Abbe of 32–36), but lenses can get very thin with high index 1.74. More on this at [2].

I've worn contacts several different times, but not only could I not get used to removing them from my eyes, I didn't like how much they worsened my close-up vision, and you can't just take off contacts like you can glasses.

This[1] comment by @mindslight on HN last year was a big help. In the end, I did have to switch providers when Costco didn't have any other material options (I got my glasses from Zehrs Optical in Canada). I payed about $325 altogether, but there was some sort of deal on so I don't know how it would be normally.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19315769

[2] https://www.2020mag.com/article/does-material-abbe-value-inf...

Mykita. You didn’t mention cheap as a requirement.

I have absolutely no problem with Zenni. The idea that I can get my prescription glasses for under $10 is kind of amazing. I've only broken one pair so far after using them for about a year.

I found a style of frames I really like and now I just keep buying them in different colors so all my lenses are interchangeable.

Warby Parker is using really cheap frames though. (And Zenni is even worse). I stopped buying at both.

At Costco you can try and choose the frame directly and at the end walk away with higher quality glasses for the same price. Same with contact lenses - you can’t buy same brands of contact lenses cheaper even online.

Plenty of companies selling a good product cheap fail though. As the OP mentions, one reason is that customer acquisition can be really expensive regardless.

(A theory certainly could be that customer acquisiton was cheaper when Warby Parker was started and there were fewer direct to consumer businesses, it was more novel).

If the difference between companies that succeeded and failed was just "do they have a good product at a good price" there wouldn't be much to write about!

These days my toughest eyewear challenge is getting an optometrist who's patient enough with my sensitive eyes to actually get the right prescription.