Meta has been flirting with retail for years now, however a Business Insider report maintains the company is finally looking to expand its retail footprint beyond its first and only brick-and-mortar location.
Citing an internal communication, the report maintains Meta is looking to hire retail staff and roll out more physical stores, which are thought to go beyond the sort of pop-up locations the company experimented with late last year.
It’s said the plans could mirror Apple’s retail strategy, although the communication seen by Business Insider is “not broadly known internally yet,” suggesting it’s still early days.
While Meta’s latest pop-up in Los Angeles garnered a fair amount of press late last year, since 2016 the company has actually launched numerous pop-up stores in addition to partnering with retailers like Best Buy to offer demo spaces for its line of XR headsets.
Beyond pop-ups, the company currently operates a single permanent Meta Store in Burlingame, California, which opened next to its Reality Labs campus in 2022. There, customers can demo Quest 3 and Quest 3S, as well as Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
The biggest driver for the retail rollout is thought to be Ray-Ban Meta Glasses however, which are built in partnership with French-Italian eyewear conglomerate EssilorLuxottica.
In 2024 alone, Meta sold more than 1 million units of its Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, making it what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called at the time “a great start.”
Earlier this year, EssilorLuxottica CEO Francesco Milleri said the company had plans to ramp up production capacity to 10 million annual units by the end of 2026.
Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, which pack in cameras for photos and video, as well as onboard Meta AI assistant and off-ear speakers, are already available in a number of styles and lens configurations, although that’s likely set to change.
Notably, a report from Bloomberg in April alleged the company is aiming to introduce a number of new smart glasses, including a pair with built-in display and a sportier pair from EssilorLuxottica sub-brand Oakley.
And the segment is heating up. Google showed off its own pair of smart glasses on stage at Google I/O earlier this month, announcing it’s partnering with eyewear companies Warby Parker and Gentle Monster to release multiple versions of its Android XR Glasses in the near future.
Meanwhile, a report from earlier this month alleged Apple is also getting into the smart glasses segment too, as the Cupertino tech giant is reportedly now producing a smart glasses chip based on the low-energy processors used in Apple Watches, which is optimized for power efficiency and the ability to control multiple cameras.
