Snap is opening its first London store to shift those unsold Spectacles

It'll open in Shoreditch's Boxpark on 11 November
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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.

Read this: Snap Spectacles changed my vacation experience

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.

Snap is opening its first London store to shift those unsold Spectacles

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Hugh Langley

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Now at Business Insider, Hugh originally joined Wareable from TechRadar where he’d been writing news, features, reviews and just about everything else you can think of for three years.

Hugh is now a correspondent at Business Insider.

Prior to Wareable, Hugh freelanced while studying, writing about bad indie bands and slightly better movies. He found his way into tech journalism at the beginning of the wearables boom, when everyone was talking about Google Glass and the Oculus Rift was merely a Kickstarter campaign - and has been fascinated ever since.

He’s particularly interested in VR and any fitness tech that will help him (eventually) get back into shape. Hugh has also written for T3, Wired, Total Film, Little White Lies and China Daily.


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