Considering all of the fanfare that Snap gave to its heavily hyped Spectacles launch, the product is selling at a slower rate than many would probably guess.
Onstage today at the Vanity Fair Establishment Summit, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel disclosed that the company had sold “over 150,000 units” of Spectacles sunglasses. Spiegel interestingly compared Spectacles sales to those of the original iPod, claiming that Spectacles had outsold the device.
Spiegel also reiterated that the device was very much a first attempt at building out a hardware division at Snap that marries the company’s software initiatives with custom devices.
“Our view is that hardware is going to be an important vehicle for delivering our customer experience maybe in a decade,” said Spiegel. “But if we believe it’s going to be important in a decade, we don’t want to be starting a decade from now.”
Last month, Snap confirmed some leadership changes for the hardware lab following a Bloomberg report on job cuts.
Ultimately, many would argue that Snap wasn’t leveraging Spectacles as much of a product launch to stake the company on as a marketing opportunity to slap a Snapchat device straight onto the faces of its users. The product was a viral marketing hit when its vending machines landed in cities across the U.S. as the company got a healthy amount of press for each new location.
The scarcity may have lasted a bit too long, missing the press cycle and thus an opportunity to extend the product’s shelf life as a product vertical. Though the first hints of the product dropped in October of 2016, the devices weren’t available online until February of 2017, at which point the hype had died down and the holiday season was far behind.
Spiegel didn’t directly confirm whether the company’s next hardware product would be a v2 version of Spectacles, but TechCrunch has reported that the company is developing a new Spectacles update that may integrate augmented reality technologies into the hardware.
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