Snap’s Spectacles are no longer exclusive to its vending machines that kept popping up at random places across the breadth of the US. The company has started selling its tech-intensive sunglasses openly and towards the same, has listed them for $129.99 at online portal Spectacles.com. The video-recording sunglasses were previously limited to Snap’s NY pop-up Store and the snapbot vending machines and folks had to form long queues to get their hands on one.
Now though, the pop-up shop has been replaced by the online portal. The snapbot vendors on the other hand, will keep mushrooming across different places in the country — giving people the opportunity to make on the spur purchases. Do note though, that you can spend $10 to $50 — depending upon whether you want to pick up charging chords or a charging case to go with the spectacles, both of which will no longer be listed on Amazon.
Speaking on the topic, a spokesperson said
As Evan shared in his interview with the WSJ, when we launched, the idea was : ‘We’re going to take a slow approach to rolling them out,’ says Spiegel. ‘It’s about us figuring out if it fits into people’s lives and seeing how they like it.’ Response has been positive since November’s launch so we’re now happy to be able to make Spectacles more readily available — especially for those in the US who have not been able to make it to a Snapbot.
While I would be lying If I went as far as saying that we were expecting the move — the signs were certainly there. After all, Snap in its IPO filing, mentioned that the Spectacles had failed to generate significant revenues for the company. The filing also mentioned that the company expected to experience production and operating costs related to Spectacles well in excess of the revenue obtained in the near future. With that said though, Spectacles are proving to be an example of marketing rightly done.
For one, the company created the right kind of anticipation about them by not launching them en-masse, while also making sure that they weren’t restricted to merely developers and geeks. This latter part was important as this was what Google did with its glasses — but then, the glasses were significantly more expensive as well.
Meanwhile, merely getting a significant portion of the public to adapt to the glasses would be a victory for Snap. After all, where do you think the folks that record these clips are going to be uploading them on? Right, Snapchat. So yeah, the company isn’t desperate to generate revenue from spectacles. However, with its IPO looming overhead, it would be an added bonus if Snap can exhibit that it has a couple of other revenue sources as well. The move to make the Spectacles publicly available through an online portal, appears to be the product of just such a line of thoughts.
