Ray-Ban Stories went on sale last Thursday and by Friday afternoon my group chat had stopped talking about the glasses and started talking about the light. The little white LED on the right hinge that is supposed to tell the room you are recording. How bright it is. Whether anyone at a bar at nine at night would notice it. Whether tape would cover it.
Nobody was arguing about the frames, which is interesting, because the frames are the entire deal.
Facebook did not build a pair of Wayfarers. EssilorLuxottica did, decades ago, and then spent a century making that silhouette mean something: film, a certain kind of cool, sunglasses your father owned. What Facebook bought here is not manufacturing. It is permission. Google went out alone in 2013 with a device that looked like a device, and the word glasshole entered the language inside a year. Put the same camera on a shape people already trust and the object stops announcing itself.
Co-branding is a loan, and the interest is always paid in trust by whichever partner has more of it to lose.
So the question I would be asking, if I were sitting on the Luxottica side of that table, is what the loan bought. Facebook gets the credibility of a hundred years of eyewear plus a distribution network of optical shops. Ray-Ban gets a hardware margin, a press cycle, and a permanent association with a company that spent the spring in a public fight over how much of you it gets to follow around. That is not a trade of equals. Equity that took four generations to build is being posted as collateral against a first-generation product.
Here is the part that gets lost when brands do this. The borrowing partner can walk away from a failed product. The lending partner cannot walk away from what the product taught people to feel about the logo. If the story that sticks is that Ray-Ban is the company that made surveillance look like eyewear, that sentence attaches to every pair on every rack, including the ones with no electronics in them at all.
Maybe it works. The glasses are handsome, they are priced like sunglasses rather than like gadgets, and most people will never think about the hinge light for one second. But handsome is not the same as trusted, and Luxottica had the rarer of the two.
Equity that took four generations to build is being posted as collateral against a first-generation product.
It rained Saturday, properly, the first real one since June, and I stood outside a food cart on Hawthorne with my hood up watching nobody wear sunglasses at all. Portland is a hard test market for anything you have to put on your face in September.