It'll open in Shoreditch's Boxpark on 11 November
Despite strong hype early on, the Snapchat Spectacles experiment didn’t quite pan out as hoped, leaving the company with $40 million worth of excess glasses lying around in a warehouse. Now Snap is opening a dedicated store in East London, which it hopes will help shift a few more pairs.
The store will be located in Shoreditch’s Boxpark and opens 11 November. It will be the first European home for Spectacles, which to date have only popped up in Snap’s temporary vending machines, Snapbots.
Snap tells Wareable that the store won’t be permanent, but will be around into early 2018. They’ll also be available in John Lewis stores across London, Kingston, Birmingham and Leeds, and in Selfridges in London and Manchester. Harrods is stocking them too.
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According to the Boxpark website, this will be an “interactive” store where you’ll also be able to demo the glasses and try on different colors, before deciding that anything but the black ones make you look ridiculous.
Snap’s Spectacles cost £130 in the UK right now, which is quite expensive for what they do, and while there was a lot of buzz around Spectacles when they first showed up, artificial scarcity undoubtedly helped play into that.
Which is to say we’re doubtful this store will do much for curtailing all that excess inventory. But hey, having already taken a $40 million hit, it probably can’t do much harm.
