Snapchat is coming back up with its Q4 revenue soaring above Wall Street expectation but, as far as its Spectacles go, they were little more than a footnote on the company results.
Snap Inc made $8 million in Spectacles revenue in Q1 of 2017; a fairly modest taking for a company of its size, but Snap said that it expect sales to be "substantially down year-over-year" in Q1 of this year and sequentially. Further to that, on a call with investors, the company said it doesn't plan to "annualize" the product. Translation: it's pretty much done with Specs - don't expect a new line for 2018.
Read this: Why Snap Specs failed, according to the people who used them
Snap was overly confident in Spectacles, which cost the company $40 million in excess inventory. In November it opened a storefront in London to shift some of those glasses, but this was only ever scheduled to remain until early 2018, Snap told us. The company has now shut down its Venice Beach store.
Looks like Snap's beachfront Spectacles store in Venice is no more. pic.twitter.com/VsHSY38APQ
— Alex Heath (@alexeheath) February 1, 2018
But just because the Spectacles story is just about over, the dream isn't necessarily dead. CEO Evan Spiegel says he's still interested in the technology, and a recent report claimed the company was at CES meeting with potential partners for future smartglasses.
The company is also pushing ahead hard on augmented reality, which has huge potential for use with future smartglasses, should Snap get them off the ground. Snap Spectacles had some cool applications, but it just wasn't enough to stick.
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By Hugh Langley
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.