Take something expensive and only accessible to rich people and make it accessible to everyone else

Democratization is the act of taking a product or service that exists only for the wealthy — because of cost structure, distribution gatekeeping, or artificial scarcity — and re-engineering the business model so that the mass market can access it. The margin compression this creates is not a sacrifice; it is the strategy.

The core insight is deceptively simple: most premium pricing is not a reflection of cost — it's a reflection of industry structure. Eyeglasses don't cost $400 because lenses are expensive. They cost $400 because Luxottica controls the supply chain from manufacturing through retail. Designer dresses don't cost $2,000 because the fabric is rare. They cost $2,000 because the fashion industry's economics depend on scarcity signaling and wholesale markups. Razors don't cost $6 per cartridge because the steel is precious. They cost $6 because Gillette spent decades building a distribution moat through retail shelf-space dominance and brand advertising.

The democratization framework asks you to identify these structural markups and then build a business model that routes around them. The mechanism varies — direct-to-consumer distribution eliminates retail margins, technology substitution replaces expensive inputs with cheaper ones, access models (rental, subscription) spread fixed costs across many users, and scale manufacturing drives unit economics below what incumbents thought possible. But the underlying move is always the same: find the gap between what something costs to produce and what people pay, then build a company in that gap.

This works because incumbents are structurally unable to respond. A luxury brand cannot cut its prices by 80% without destroying the scarcity signal that justifies its existence. A vertically integrated monopolist cannot disintermediate its own retail channel without cannibalizing its most profitable business unit. The innovator's dilemma applies with particular force here: the incumbent's best customers — the wealthy ones paying full price — are the last people who want the product democratized. So the incumbent rationally ignores the threat until it's too late.

The result, when it works, is a market expansion effect that dwarfs the original luxury market. The global luxury eyewear market is roughly $40 billion. The total addressable market for affordable corrective eyewear — the market Warby Parker is actually playing in — is closer to $150 billion. Democratization doesn't steal market share. It creates market size.