How Meta designed its new eyewear to appeal to smart glasses skeptics
Meta is now a fashion brand. Today, the tech company launched a new collection of smart glasses designed for the first time in-house and manufactured by its longtime partner Essilor Luxottica.“This is the first step of Meta taking a really hard pass at becoming relevant in the fashion glasses world,” Peter Bristol, the VP of Industrial Design at Meta, said during a press briefing yesterday. “I hope to earn that right with the products that we ship.”[Photo: Meta]The silhouettes are archetypal—a squarish rectangle (the Meta Adventurer), a chunkier squarish rectangle (the Meta Fury), and a cat eye (the Meta Starfire Kylie Edition, a collaboration with Kylie Jenner). Each is designed to flatter a wide range of faces.[Photos: Meta]Bringing design in house “allows just a little bit more flexibility in terms of price tiering and feature decisions over time,” Bristol tells Fast Company. “There is no world where one brand is sufficient to bring smart glasses to the right kind of breadth in the world.” The collection starts at $299.Tech companies have been racing to corner the smart glasses market, and they’re doing it by normalizing the aesthetic. Gone are the days when these wearables resembled a cyborg’s appendage. Today’s smart glasses are increasingly indistinguishable fashion glasses without technology. Meta has been working with EssilorLuxottica (which owns Ray-Ban, Oakley, and Persol) since 2019; Google recently announced partnerships with Samsung, Warby Parker and Gentle Monster on a series of fashion-forward frames to help encourage adoption. On the other end of the spectrum, last week, Snap released Specs, a hulking pair of AR glasses that don’t rely on a smartphone for computing power and support spatial apps. [Photo: Meta]The move into smart glasses has been successful for Meta. Last year, Meta and EssilorLuxottica sold 7 million pairs of AI glasses. In January, Bloomberg reported that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg wanted to increase its production capacity t