This month marks the 10th anniversary since Ditto was founded.
It’s kind of crazy when I take a step back and let that sink in. It’s not lost on me that most startups don’t last that long, and I’m insanely proud that we are still standing despite, quite frankly, an absurd amount of obstacles ranging from two nasty lawsuits over IP that took us 4.5 years to resolve, scrappy pivots and even scrappier fundraising, and an industry that has been frustratingly slow to move online or adopt technology.
I’ll write a longer post in the next few weeks summarizing my reflections on the journey to date, key learnings and answer the question I get asked a lot “How did you manage through that and keep going?”
Today, I just want to celebrate. I want to celebrate the long roster of people who built Ditto with me — many of whom worked their tails off for several years before moving on, some of whom I had to let go during hard times or strategic shifts, and some who are still by my side. Entrepreneurship is a team sport and I simply could not have done it without our incredible team, Board of Directors, investors and partners.
It’s also a time to celebrate how far we’ve come and how much we’ve learned and grown. Ten years later, over 60M people use our technology each year to try on over 1 billion pairs of glasses each per month! We’ve partnered with some of the best eyewear retailers and brands around the world including Specsavers, Zenni, GrandVision, NVI, Misterspex, Lenskart, JINS, Quay and more. Ditto is far more global than I could have imagined with over 55% of our business coming from outside of the U.S.
I’m also so proud of what we’ve built — the best eyewear virtual try-on and frame discovery technology for eyewear in the world. We are inventors who built this from scratch, earning 13 issued patents with 5 more on the way and counting. We have the highest quality digital glasses I’ve seen and have over 90,000 digital glasses in our library complete with accurate data extracted automatically from the glasses. We pioneered a sophisticated, nuanced frame recommendation engine and the ability to detect and classify customers’ faces with precision so we can help them find their perfect pair.
10 Years: Ditto by the Numbers
1,000,000,000+ digital glasses tried on each month
60,489,097+ ditto users
90,502+ digital glasses in our library
60+ intelligent people on our growing team
18 issued and pending patents
1 audacious goal of making eyewear accessible and personal for everyone
Conclusion
We are well on our way to transforming how eyewear is bought and sold for millions of customers around the world both online and in stores. We have an incredibly exciting roadmap, plans to launch in China in a few months, and new partnerships with other industry leaders that are helping us create streamlined end-to-end solutions for our clients. We are making shopping for eyewear fun, easy, personalized, and accessible and helping with digital transformation of the eyewear industry.
The most exciting part is that we are just getting started…
