A friend cleaned out her apartment in January and offered me her Spectacles the way you offer someone a spare phone charger. Coral, still in the little yellow case, worn maybe four times. She had stood in a line in the Pearl to get them. She could not remember why.
Snap wrote down around forty million dollars of unsold Spectacles last fall. I keep coming back to that number, because it is not really a manufacturing number. Manufacturing was fine. It is a brand number, and it was legible months before the accountants got to it.
The vending machines were great. That part worked.
A yellow Snapbot appearing unannounced in Venice, then Big Sur, then some parking lot nobody expected, was the most on brand thing Snap has ever done. Ephemeral, playful, slightly annoying to chase, exactly like the app itself. I have watched agencies try to reverse engineer that stunt in pitch rooms ever since and mostly produce sadness.
Then people put the glasses on their faces.
A software brand can make you download something. It cannot make you wear something.
Wearing is a different transaction entirely. A phone lives in your pocket and answers to you. Glasses live on your face and answer to everyone looking at you, which means the brand has to survive a stranger's read from six feet away. That is fashion, and fashion permission takes years, taste, and usually somebody on staff who has done it before. Warby Parker spent most of a decade earning the right to sit on a nose. Snap assumed the logo would carry it. The people who did buy a pair wore them for a weekend and then stopped, which is the tell.
It also assumed the use case would show up later. Hardware does not work that way. Nobody has ever bought a thing to find out what it was for. Spectacles asked you to become the person who is always recording, at a moment when nobody had settled how they felt about being recorded, and Snap never made an argument for why you should want that. It made a color.
What separated the vending machines from the glasses was not budget or timing. One of them was Snap being Snap. The other was Snap auditioning to be somebody else, in public, wearing a costume it had not earned.
Nobody has ever bought a thing to find out what it was for.
I sang Sea of Love at karaoke on Thursday, badly, and the host, who calls everyone baby, told me at least I had committed to it. Commitment is the whole thing. Snap committed to the launch and never committed to the product, and you can hear that difference in a room by the second line.