How Pair Eyewear Turned Glasses Into a Collectible Growth Engine

Hey everyone,

Welcome back for another bite to chew on.

Most eyewear brands live on a brutal clock. A customer buys, disappears, then maybe comes back a couple of years later when the prescription changes.

That is a hard model to build momentum on. It limits how often you can talk, merch, launch, and re-engage without falling back on discounts.

Pair Eyewear attacked that problem from multiple angles at once. The product made glasses customizable, but the real unlock was turning that customization into a content engine, a drop engine, and a lifecycle engine.

What stood out in our conversation with Grant Goldman, Pair's VP of Marketing, is how tightly those systems work together. He oversees acquisition, lifecycle, marketing, and creative, which is probably why the playbook feels more like a modern DTC operating model than a niche eyewear story.

The result is a brand that found a way to make a replacement product feel dynamic, collectible, and worth checking back on far more often than the category usually allows.

On the Menu:

BTW, this is just a taste of our chat with Grant. Listen to the full recording here.

Over the last few months, social feeds have been completely taken over with non-stop updates about the state of AI. Literally every day (and sometimes every hour) we’re seeing new startups that are launching and new companies that just raised funding.

But there’s one category that still painfully feels stuck in 2016: email marketing. 

Literally every good eCommerce brand we know relies on this channel, yet many are still leaving 30% to 50% of their site revenue on the table because they still run manual and generic email flows.

The brands winning today are using AI flows to craft curated emails to every shopper, at scale.

Here’s a few Shopify stores that stand out: 

Linda’s sells high-quality quilting supplies and provides educational content to empower quilters of all skill levels. They are a merchant with thousands of SKUs, where manual campaign management is literally impossible. 

With Instant AI powered price drop flows enabled, it quickly became a top-two performer, just behind their cart abandonment flows (also from Instant) in total revenue. 

After using Instant, they added $3.5M in incremental revenue at a 109x ROI. Now, Linda’s email revenue makes up 51% of their total Shopify revenue, 5x higher than before Instant which is insane.

Then there’s another leading skin brand I know about who saw $1.1M in incremental revenue in the first 100 days on Instant. They achieved an absurd 303x ROI compared to what they paid for Instant.

This brand has consistently achieved 10-20% MoM growth in email flow revenue through Instant’s identification. They’re sending more emails every month, and because revenue per email is also growing from personalization, they’re scaling faster than ever before. 

The best part about Instant is that the more emails you send, the more Instant’s AI learns and is able to run A/B tests in terms of copy, images, products, and offers to improve your revenue per email.

This is how the significant MoM growth is achieved with Instant AI.

What blew us away when we started using Instant at Obvi is how bought in their customers are. The case studies are super powerful, and so is the feedback from the operators running these brands.

Now are you going to be the one person who reads this email and lets your competitors use this tool before you? We didn’t think so. 

If you run a Shopify brand doing $1M+ in revenue and want to see how much incremental revenue Instant could unlock, you can get 50% off your first 60 days of Instant now.

We’ve recommended dozens of companies to use it and the results have been so strong that they all wish we had gotten them on Instant sooner.

TikTok has been a major channel for Pair since 2020, but the real lesson is not simply "show up on TikTok." Pair treated the channel as three connected layers: partnerships, paid ads, and organic brand content.

That matters because the best DTC content systems do not isolate creator content from media buying or brand storytelling. They let each layer feed the next.

The initial unlock came when a real customer named Melissa posted organically and sales spiked overnight. Grant was in Central Park on a Saturday, saw a giant spike on Shopify, checked the post-purchase survey, and every answer said TikTok.

That gave Pair a very clear signal about what kind of content the market would actually trust. Grant put it plainly: "People who have a real organic connection to glasses, who have worn them their entire life... they're able to sell it and pitch it in a way that non-organic glasses wearers can't."

That is the part most brands skip. They chase reach before they lock in believable product fit.

Today Pair works with 250-300 partners every month across niches, but volume was not the original advantage. They started with 10 creators, measured what percentage hit, then scaled from 10 to 20, 20 to 40, 40 to 60.

The advantage was finding creators who could talk about the product naturally because it already fit into their lives.

What you can do: Before scaling creator spend, audit your current partners. How many of them actually use your product in daily life? If the answer is less than half, you are paying for reach without believability. Start with 10 real users who love your product and build from there.

Pair has 22 frame shapes and keeps expanding the portfolio, but the bigger point is cadence. New top-frame designs drop nearly every week — roughly 18 designs across 22 frames, 52 weeks a year. That changes the customer relationship from occasional replacement to ongoing discovery.

That is how you make a product category feel alive. You stop acting like the purchase is static and start giving customers fresh reasons to come back.

Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, Disney Princess, MLB, NHL, and NBA are not just flashy logos in this model. They serve two purposes: they meet the demands of existing customers (Pair's Facebook group gets daily requests for specific licenses), and they bridge into audiences who have never heard of Pair before.

Grant explained the split: Disney collections drive retention by giving existing fans something new to collect, while sports partnerships drive acquisition by lending Pair legitimacy with audiences who might never have discovered them otherwise.

Add in limited-edition releases and bring-back collections (inspired by Jordan retros), and you get a repeat-purchase loop that feels more like collecting than replacing.

What you can do: Map your customer base's identity signals. What fandoms, communities, or cultural moments do they already care about? A licensing or collab strategy works best when it reinforces demand you can already see, not when you are guessing at what might stick.

Limited-edition strategy only works when operations can keep up. Pair's vertically integrated production — lenses made in the US, flexible manufacturing that can scale up or down — lets the team lean into winners and pull back on underperformers in real time.

Grant said, "We've turned around collections in as fast as two weeks." That is what makes the drop strategy credible. Scarcity messaging is easy. Operational responsiveness is harder, and far more valuable.

Traditional eyewear replacement cycles sit around 2 to 2.5 years. If you accept that as your only rhythm, you end up with a brand that goes quiet between prescriptions.

Pair built around a different idea. Top frames create a reason to talk to customers weekly instead of waiting years for the next obvious purchase window. As Grant put it, other brands are "blasting their customers every single week like, hey, buy another frame," but that is a hard sell when the customer does not need one. Top frames make the outreach feel valuable instead of desperate.

Pair's 80,000-member Facebook community is not just a nice brand asset. It is a feedback surface where customers share requests, react to products, and signal what they want next. Members post about discontinued designs that become almost mythical — "like StockX," Grant said — which inspired the bring-back collection strategy.

That makes loyalty, subscriptions, exclusive products, and elite-tier access much more interesting than blunt discounting. Their subscription program (launched in 2025) gives top-tier buyers exclusive product that other customers cannot get. Customers get reasons to stay close to the brand that are not purely price-driven.

What you can do: If you do not have a community feedback surface yet, start one. It does not need to be 80,000 members. Even a small private group where your best customers can react to upcoming products will give you demand signals that no survey or analytics dashboard can replicate.

Grant kept coming back to speed — especially in creative iteration and in responding to customers across social and community surfaces. When a collection spikes, the internal creative team works on scaling that concept the same day. When customers comment on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, the team talks to them right there, which creates a snowball of commentary that becomes a viral growth engine.

That is the compounding advantage. If you keep an open mind, test aggressively, and fail within reason, your learning loop gets tighter and the brand gets smarter faster than the market around you. Speed in responding to customers is also where tools like Instant AI can help — the faster you can identify a shopper, match the message to their behavior, and recover attention before it goes cold, the more your retention engine compounds.