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Warby Parker Wants Its Culture to Feel the Same on the Sales Floor and at HQ
I DEEP DIVE INSIDER PROFILES
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Chief People Officer Chelsea Kaden is building the systems that keep Warby Parker’s culture recognisable across a workforce that rarely works in the same place or in the same way. Chelsea Kaden has a slightly different culture problem from the one facing a typical office-based company.
Warby Parker’s people experience has to work for someone at its New York headquarters and for somebody spending the day with customers in one of hundreds of stores. It also has to make sense inside optical labs and clinical teams. At the end of 2025, Warby Parker had 4,036 team members and 323 locations, which means culture cannot depend on everyone absorbing the same atmosphere from the same room.
Kaden, who has led Warby Parker’s people function since 2019, is responsible for making that culture travel.
The goal is not to make every part of Warby Parker feel identical. The work is too different for that. What the company is trying to preserve is a shared understanding of how people are expected to behave when they are making decisions, dealing with customers or working with one another.
Warby Parker says the basic principles behind its culture have remained consistent since its earliest days. What has changed is the amount of infrastructure required to keep those principles visible as the company has grown.
For Kaden, that makes culture an operating question as much as an engagement one.
Employees need to know what good looks like in their role. They also need ways to tell the company when the employee experience is not working as intended. In Warby
Parker’s 2025 engagement survey, 89% of respondents said they understood what they needed to do to be successful in their job. The company says more than three-quarters also believed they had effective ways to give, receive and ask for feedback.
There are concrete systems behind those numbers. Performance conversations happen regularly rather than being confined to an annual cycle. Employees evaluate managers as well as receiving feedback from them, while one-to-ones create a more frequent place to deal with issues while they are still useful to discuss.
That two-way element is important. Warby Parker’s stated belief is that feedback should improve the company as well as the individual. Employees are treated as stakeholders in the organisation, so the same process that asks somebody to improve their performance also gives them a way to say what Warby Parker could improve around them.
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The harder challenge is keeping people connected when so much of the workforce is distributed. Warby Parker still holds a weekly All-Hands at its New York headquarters, but the rhythms look different elsewhere. Stores come together through quarterly calls, while teams use their own huddles and off-sites to create similar moments of context and connection. The important part is less the format than making sure people working far from headquarters are not expected to piece together what is happening from fragments.
Once a year, that becomes much more physical.
Warby Parker’s One Vision Summit brings leaders from the field together with people from Eye Care and headquarters. More than 540 employees attended in 2025. The three-day gathering is designed around the work ahead, giving people who normally experience the company from very different vantage points a shared understanding of what Warby Parker is trying to do next.
That is a useful clue to how Kaden’s team thinks about belonging. Connection is not treated purely as social interaction. Some of the most important culture-building happens when people better understand the work happening elsewhere in the company and how their own decisions affect it.
The more playful parts of Warby Parker’s culture have been kept deliberately visible too.
One of its longstanding recognition rituals is the Blue-Footed Booby Award, given when somebody particularly embodies the company’s values. Employees also use company-wide virtual recognition to thank colleagues for work that might otherwise go unseen. In a business with thousands of people, these rituals give employees a way to make the culture specific: this person did something worth noticing, and this is why.
In the 2025 engagement survey, 86% of respondents said they felt part of a team. That result came from a survey with a 90% participation rate among eligible employees, giving Warby Parker a relatively broad view of how the experience was landing across the organisation.
Growth is handled in much the same practical way.
New employees are introduced to the company through onboarding designed to give them early clarity about their role and a connection to how Warby Parker works. Leadership development is then focused on making management more consistent as the organisation grows, particularly when leaders are guiding teams through change.
The company also creates opportunities for people to develop through the work itself.
Employees can move into projects outside their usual remit and learn more of the business by participating in cross-functional work. It is a straightforward idea: career growth becomes more useful when it also increases somebody’s understanding of how the company actually operates.
Kaden’s role is becoming more complicated as technology changes that work.
Warby Parker has made AI part of its next stage of growth, and Kaden has been unusually clear that People teams cannot simply wait for technology leaders to determine what that means for employees. Speaking about her own early approach to AI, she acknowledged that waiting for the CTO to take the lead was a mistake and that HR needed to become an active participant in the change.
Her focus has been practical rather than theoretical. Kaden has said Warby Parker is particularly interested in using AI to remove friction for customer-facing employees — for example, helping someone get to the right information faster while they are standing in front of a customer who needs an answer.
That example gets at something broader about Warby Parker’s culture.
The company does not need employees to talk about culture all day. It needs the culture to make the work better. Feedback should help someone improve while there is still time to act on it. Leadership development should result in a better manager. Technology should make a store employee more capable in the moment rather than simply give headquarters another tool.
Warby Parker has been explicit that it considers its culture part of its ability to succeed as it grows. Its public filings even identify losing that culture through scale as a business risk.
That makes Kaden’s job less about preserving a nostalgic version of the company and more about deciding what has to remain recognisably Warby Parker as the business keeps changing.
The answer seems to be showing up in relatively ordinary places: whether people know what is expected of them, whether they can tell a manager something difficult, whether somebody working in a store still understands what the wider company is trying to achieve, and whether good work gets noticed when it happens. For a company spread across hundreds of locations, that is where culture eventually has to live.
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