How Blenders Eyewear Uses Atria to Build a Performance Creative Culture from the Top Down

"I don't want to go back to the prehistoric days before Atria. Atria gives you a much more targeted bullseye to hit for creative strategy."

Blenders Eyewear: From Backpacks on the Beach to Global Brand

Chase Fisher started Blenders Eyewear with $2,000 borrowed from his roommate, selling sunglasses out of a backpack on the beaches of San Diego. Fourteen years later, the brand sold for $90 million and is still growing at a rapid clip.

Chase has always been a systems thinker, someone who asks what tools can make this business easier and faster. When Atria came up in his founders group, recommended by the founder of Ridge Wallets, he didn't hesitate. It filled a gap his team didn't have a good answer for.

The Challenge: Building a Performance Creative Culture

Blenders built its early reputation on authenticity: real people, real lifestyle, grassroots energy. That brand DNA is still what makes them special. But as the business scaled, a natural tension emerged between brand creative and performance creative. The two require genuinely different instincts, and most creative teams are built for one or the other.

"Brand and performance are totally different animals. We needed a way to bridge that gap and change how the whole team thinks, from focusing on creative to also focusing on performance."

Before Atria, understanding what was working meant either waiting for reports or navigating Meta's backend directly. Neither gave the team a clear, actionable picture.

"Our CFO loves digging into the numbers, and he was always sending out reports, but no one was reading them. They weren’t easy to understand."

The creative workflow itself was what Chase calls the traditional process: ads built in Photoshop, dropped into Dropbox, sent off to the paid media agency for review, and iterated on through a slow back-and-forth. Chase also wanted to push for bolder creative variety, not tweaks around the edges, but genuinely different concepts and hooks.

"It was just this lengthy, arduous process."

How Atria Came Into the Picture

Atria didn't come through a sales pitch. It came through Chase's founders group, a tight circle of nine founders collectively doing over a billion dollars in sales, all sharing tools and unlocks with each other. When the Ridge Wallets founder dropped Atria in the group chat, Chase took notice.

"I checked you guys out and I thought, wow, this is a really cool tool. This is something we don't currently have. And this is something that could be valuable for us."

As a visual learner, Chase immediately connected with how Atria surfaces competitor creative, ad spend, and performance data in a way that's easy to see and act on. Finally, everyone could get to the same performance-focused insights without needing a data science degree.

What Blenders Uses Atria For Today

With 12 team members on the platform, Blenders’ process starts with Atria’s competitor research and creative intelligence. The team follows brands they admire, studying their ad formats, hooks, spend patterns, and creative diversity to get inspiration.

"With Atria, there are no excuses not to try new things. Atria just slams that point home. This is what's working. So let’s try this."

For Chase, one of the biggest unlocks has been using that competitive visibility to spark new conversations with his team. Seeing what other brands are spending on, what hooks they're using, and how much variety top performers maintain gives everyone a shared, data-grounded reference point for what performance creative looks like in practice.

"Atria forces the team to rethink their creative vision so they’re also thinking about what drives performance. Atria keeps you accountable. It keeps you honest."

It has also become a shared language across the team. Rather than chasing down reports or translating data for non-technical stakeholders, the team can pull up Atria and get aligned quickly on what the competitive landscape looks like and where the creative gaps are.

Advice for Other Founders

"Use it. You are fortunate to have this tool. I didn't have this when I first started. Now we have AI and we're able to look at all this information in one place. This is one of the best tools you can use in e-com and you should use it. If you use it, you'll see success."

For Blenders, this is just the beginning. Chase sees ad creation as the next frontier to unlock Atria's capabilities. The goal is a creative system that produces meaningful creative diversity at scale, targeted iterations that actually move the needle, with AI at the center of everything they do.