Snapchat Spectacles (1st gen)

» see spectacles.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

spectacles were sunglasses with a tiny camera in the corner that recorded ten-second circular clips for snapchat. snap announced them in september 2016 with a single article in the wall street journal. the phrasing was deliberate, evan spiegel was repositioning the company as a "camera company" right before the IPO. the first pair came out of a yellow vending machine, the snapbot, that materialized in venice beach on november 10, 2016 with no warning. the line went around the block. people resold pairs on ebay for ten times retail.

the snapbot then moved to big sur and other us cities, with the lines holding up for weeks. for about three months snap let demand outrun supply on purpose. when the company finally opened web sales in february 2017, the scarcity engine that had been doing all the work just stopped working. early buyers had already churned. by some internal estimates more than half of users stopped wearing them within a month. snap had committed to a much larger production run than the actual demand justified, and in october 2017 the company disclosed a $40 million write-off on unsold inventory and supplier commitments.

spectacles 2 launched in april 2018 with no vending machines and no yellow ring around the lens. snap kept iterating on the form factor for years afterward and eventually pivoted into AR developer prototypes that were never sold to consumers. but the original yellow-rim version, the venice beach snapbot one, the IPO mascot, was already over by the end of 2017.

spectacles never reached turkey through a snapbot. snapchat itself had a smaller user base here than in the us, and the camera-glasses moment was so tightly tied to the snapbot stunt that it did not really translate. i read about the venice beach lines on the verge a few days late and filed it under "us-coast tech-bro toy." the $40 million write-off felt like the more turkish-readable part of the story.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how the snapbot worked ~

the snapbot was a yellow plastic kiosk that took $130 in cash or card and dispensed one pair of spectacles plus a charging case. it had a circular window so you could see the next color get loaded before it dropped. snap moved it from city to city without announcing the schedule until the morning of, which kept the lines and the social-media coverage on a continuous drip. for a few months the snapbot tour was the most intentional piece of marketing snap ever ran.

the problem was that the snapbot was the product. once you could buy spectacles online from a normal product page, the magic that justified the $130 evaporated. the device underneath was just a camera with a wifi sync that produced ten-second clips you mostly never re-watched.

~ what it cost ~

$40 million in unsold inventory and excess purchasing commitments. snap admitted this in q3 2017, which was their first earnings cycle as a public company. it became the first big stumble of the post-IPO snap story and one of the more quoted examples in business-school decks about confusing a launch event with a product launch. the second-generation spectacles still got built but with no expectation of consumer scale.

~ the funny part ~

resale prices on ebay went from $400 in november 2016 to $30 in late 2017. the same yellow vending machine that produced the lines also produced the inventory glut, because snap read the resale prices as proof that they should manufacture more. the snapbot was a one-time stunt that snap accidentally read as a demand signal.

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