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Snapchat Reportedly Stuck With 'Hundreds of Thousands' of Unsold Spectacles (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the stuck-up dept.

According to The Information, Snapchat expected demand for its camera-equipped glasses known as Spectacles to continue after the holidays and ordered "hundreds of thousands" of additional units. But demand didn't pick up after the company opened up its sales to a wider audience, leaving those units to collect dust in warehouses. The Verge reports: It's not known exactly how many Spectacles have been sold so far, but from the sound of it, Snap may have dramatically over-ordered units of its debut hardware device. Earlier this month, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said the company had sold "over 150,000 units," which sounds pretty bad in the context of having hundreds of thousands sitting around waiting to be sold; although The Information says that figure includes unassembled units with parts that could potentially be used in other products. Spiegel has tried to paint Spectacles as both relatively successful and merely an early start in hardware. He claims they outsold Apple's first iPod -- a comparison clearly meant to suggest they could eventually have enormous success. But Spiegel also said hardware would really only be important to Snap a decade from now.

10 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. Darn. by SeaFox · · Score: 2

    What a spectacle they've made of themselves with their ambitions dashed.

  2. Misery loves company by Tablizer · · Score: 2

    Are they compatible with all those ET game cartridges in landfill?

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
    1. Re:Misery loves company by SeaFox · · Score: 2

      Even Spectacles wont let you see those buried cartridges, they were exhumed in 2013.

  3. Stop doing acid in the boardroom by known_coward_69 · · Score: 2

    has to be the only explanation for why this turd got funding

  4. stock for worldwide debut, but market for upsell? by xeno · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The comparison to the iPod is backwards -- snap did precisely every wrong thing. By contrast, Apple works hard to create a broad-market appeal: even if the product is drenched in hipster niche mystique, everyone and I mean EVERYONE hears about it. Then they manufacture and stock the item, no matter what it is, for something like 60-80% of the expected actual sales on the first go. This ensures it's enough to get in the hands of someone you know even if you can't get it yourself... while also creating an artificial scarcity to ensure the perception of demand. The secondary manufacturing waves then kick in, according to actual orders, and they coast from one relatively successful debut to another.

    Snap, on the other hand... did everything wrong. I'm the target market for damn near every stupid doodad, but I didn't hear ANYTHING about it because it was marketed within snapchat as if it were a limited upsell only to dedicated snapchat users.. because they designed it to be unusable to anyone not already sold on the service. Then they put all their eggs into the initial manufacturing run rather than a calculated step-by-step ramp up. What a fuck-up. Did no one inside Snap think to make it enticing the other way around -- to make it usable for non-chat users but so much cooler if you signed up for Snapchat? Did they soft-open to create sufficient buzz? Did they advertise ANYWHERE outside their own underpants?

    SHM, if you were designing a product failure, they ticked every box except for the one where the glasses light on fire.
    That's next week, undoubtedly -- after they firesale and start shipping swollen li-ion batteries that have been discharging in a hot warehouse for months.

    --
    I think not...(*poof*)
  5. Ask your dad what the CueCat was by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    When you distribute new hardware, even cheap hardware, to the masses make sure it actually does something that said masses find useful.

  6. It isn't cool to be creepy. by markdavis · · Score: 2

    >"Snapchat expected demand for its camera-equipped glasses "

    I am guessing that the masses got the "glasshole" messages from the last several rounds. It isn't cool to be creepy, thank goodness. We all have cameras on our phones- they aren't hard to use, and it is far less rude/antisocial/ego-centric than making everyone constantly wonder if you are recording them every moment, especially in bathrooms, when having private conversations, when trying to eat, in sensitive business meetings, during exams, etc.

    So please, take your "camera glasses" and shove them somewhere more appropriate than on people's faces!

    1. Re:It isn't cool to be creepy. by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

      I have to disagree on "we all have our cameras they're pretty easy to use" I personally saw Spectacles as a more fun and more "social" and actually more fashionable way of gopros. they actually warn people around if theyre recording since they have blinking light but 1st not everyone has to know and second first news I read after they've became available was "how to hide the record light". For me this is a situation of we are the reason we cant have nice things. this was same with google glasses, creeps recording everything. and in google glasses case, those are just INSANELY obvious

      The glasses are made to be insanely obvious. If you wanted to record surreptitiously, there are dozens of spy cam glasses available that are far more discrete. These are intentionally loud, basically to combat the glasshole syndrome. You aren't going to miss someone wearing them , especially indoors.

      The real problem was marketing. At first, they were marketed only to the top users as a special privilege thing (and even so they ran out of stock quickly). I'm guessing they never announced it was generally available so everyone thought they were still highly limited and hard to get.

      And people were not buying it for the creepiness - since there are far better solutions for that (and probably sold on Amazon).

  7. Wallet and watch by Presence+Eternal · · Score: 2

    $130 and they don't appear to list the technical specifications anywhere on the product page. Maybe I just missed it, but I did look and saw nothing. Not the resolution nor the storage capacity nor the estimated charge length. Also you have to touch the button every ten seconds. Also they're damn fugly.

  8. evan thinks he is freaking irreplaceable dreamboi by gok9ok · · Score: 2

    Same thing here. They made it too inclusive and thought people are gonna chase after them forever. They were cool but not cool enough to make me check every 2 days if there is a place nearby. Took way too long for them to make it online.PLUS came to Europe waaay later. I've just realized it is available online now. And even if it is available language is geo-based and you're not allowed to change. not everybody lives in US and not everybody speaks the language of the country they live in. ux fail for sure.