An Annual Report You’ll Actually Want to Read

(Photo credit: Warby Parker’s Annual Report)

Warby Parker, the online retailer for boutique-quality prescription eyewear and sunglasses, has spurred a business model adopted by countless new companies, and now, it’s launched a whole new way for modern companies to reflect and report on their year.

The company’s Year in Review 2014, published this week, is refreshingly simple and user-friendly. The brand has created a digestible and interactive way for fans, customers, and (I’m assuming) investors, to wade through the company’s most impressive feats of 2014. By data-mining and delivering key facts to a skilled designer, the company has attempted to reinvent the flowcharts and pie graphs that typically accompany such reports.

Like the adept online marketer it is, the company has created a generator for users to make-your-own annual report. The self-proclaimed, “non-scientific, highly-specific” personal annual reports project your top emojis of 2014, latin motto, projected nicknames for 2015, spirit animal and other usesless information that creates personal content that you can’t help but want to share on social media – an action made even easier by the personalized URL and prompt to share your report. According to Fast Company, “it’s not a report as much as it is an interactive viral advertisement.”

The generator engages users at a time of year when reflection is on all of our minds, and its purpose isn’t just to sell you eyewear, though, I’m sure this will help cement brand loyalists. The creative spin on an otherwise mundane topic is just another way the brand is shaking up the retail industry.