Meta has flirted with retail for years, Business Insider The report argues that the company is ultimately trying to expand its retail footprint beyond its first and only brick-and-mortar location.
Citing internal communications, the report keeps Meta is looking to hire retail staff and deploy more physical stores.
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The plan is said to reflect Apple’s retail strategy, Business Insider The fact that “it’s not yet widely known internally” suggests that it is still an early age.
Meta’s latest pop-up in Los Angeles won a fair amount of press at the end of last year, but since 2016, the company has actually launched a number of pop-up stores in addition to partnering with retailers such as Best Buy to provide demo space for its line of XR headsets.
Beyond the pop-ups, the company currently operates a single permanent metastore in Burlingame, California, which opened in 2022 next to the Reality Lab Campus. So customers can also make Demo Quest 3 and Quest 3 and Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses.
The biggest driver of the retail rollout is thought to be Ray-Ban Metaglass, built in collaboration with French AItalian glasses conglomerate Esilol Luxottica.
In 2024 alone, Meta sold over a million Ray-Ban Metagrass, selling what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called a “great start” at the time.
Earlier this year, Essilorluxottica CEO Francesco Milleri said the company plans to increase its production capacity to 10 million units by the end of 2026.
The Ray-Ban Meta Meta, packed into cameras for photography and video, and onboard meta AI assistant and off-ear speakers are already available in many styles and lens configurations, but that is subject to change.
In particular, reports from Bloomberg In April, the company claimed it was aiming to introduce a number of new smart glasses, including pairs with built-in displays and sportier pairs of Essilorluxottica’s sub-brand Oakley.
And the segments are getting hot. Google showed off its own smart glasses on the Google I/O stage earlier this month, and announced that it will partner with Eyewear Companies Warby Parker and Gentle Monster to release multiple versions of Android XR glasses in the near future.
Meanwhile, the Cupertino Tech giant is reportedly currently producing smart glasses chips based on the low-energy processors used by Apple Watch, which are optimized for power efficiency and control multiple cameras, so Apple is also said to be in the smart glasses segment earlier this month.