It was interesting to hear last November when Snap Inc. brought an interesting piece of hardware to the market. We’ve seen companies such as Google experiment with this type of product (Google Glass), but Snap seems to be failing. The camera-equipment sunglasses called Spectacles came out hot, woo-ing everyone and looked great. But now a year later, a new report tells that there are “hundreds of thousands” of unsold Spectacles sitting in warehouses in China.
According to a report from The Information, Snap executives seemed to have gotten a bit too excited with the initial hype and demand around Spectacles, and now there are too many of them. Tom Dotan and Reed Albertgotti write:
Snap badly overestimated demand for its Spectacles and now has hundreds of thousands of unsold units sitting in warehouses, either fully assembled or in parts, according to two people close to the company. The disclosure undercuts Snap CEO Evan Spiegel’s recent contention that Spectacles sales of more than 150,000 had topped the company’s expectations.
From the explanation above, it makes it seem like Spiegel lied, but he could have been basically saying that Spectacles beat his company’s initial expectations for a small period of time. So what does this mean exactly? Well, basically means something messed up pretty bad at Snap Inc. Anonymous sources told The Information that Snap executives “were so enthused by early buzz about the Spectacles—there were big lines at first for the mobile vending machines that dispensed the glasses—that they ordered a huge amount.”
The problem now is that since Spectacles were readily available at places such as Amazon and Walmart, people didn’t need to line up to buy them. It wasn’t necessary. The hype was real and I’m sure there still is hype around the product, just not as much as Snap had hoped. Like any product, hype does die overtime. This sucks for Snap. The company now looks towards a future where they can offer some newer hardware. Hopefully, this time they don’t mess up and get “over-hyped.”
