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The hot sales of "Ray-Ban Meta" have once again ignited the enthusiasm of the industry. The maturity of technology has made smart glasses once again the most likely to win in the AI ​​hardware market.

Author: Xin Ling
edit| Zheng Xuan

Recently, foreign media reported that Meta plans to spend billions of dollars to acquire approximately 5% of the shares of EssilorLuxottica, a European eyewear giant worth 88 billion euros.

You may not know EssilorLuxottica, but you must have heard of its brand Ray-Ban. Meta has worked with Ray-Ban to develop two generations of smart glasses: "Ray-Ban Stories" and "Ray-Ban Meta", the latter of which, according to third-party estimates by foreign media, has sold more than 1 million units. In Meta's last earnings call, Zuckerberg mentioned that several styles have been sold out.

The impressive sales performance demonstrates the public's love for "Ray-Ban Meta" and also seems to point out a new direction for the future development of smart glasses: with the support of the latest technologies such as AI big models, technology companies provide technical capabilities and return hardware manufacturing and sales work to successful hardware brand companies.

Of course, Meta is not the only one who thinks this way.

According to foreign media reports, Google is also approaching the leadership of EssilorLuxottica to discuss incorporating its Gemini AI assistant into future smart glasses. This move may exclude Meta from the high-profile cooperation, but it is more likely to help Zuckerberg accelerate investment actions.

From the competition between Google and Meta, we can see that the two technology giants are still competing for the next generation of smart hardware. At the same time, it also makes people wonder: is there no other eyewear company to cooperate with? What kind of company is EssilorLuxottica that makes the two technology giants so eager to let it go?

01

Who is EssilorLuxottica?

EssilorLuxottica is the result of the merger of Essilor and Luxottica | Image source: lesechos.fr

EssilorLuxottica You may not be familiar with it, but as long as you have worn glasses, you must have heard of Essilor, which is Essilor.

EssilorLuxottica was formed in 2017 through the merger of France's Essilor, the world's largest lens manufacturer, and Italy's Luxottica, the world's largest eyewear manufacturer.

Essilor was founded in France in 1972 through the merger of two eyewear brands, Essel and Silor, which were founded in 1849 and 1931 respectively. Before merging with Luxottica, Essilor had expanded its business to 115 countries and regions around the world.

Founded in Milan, Italy in 1961, Luxottica is one of the brands with the largest eyewear retail network in the world, covering 130 countries and regions around the world. It is also the world's largest sunglass company.

Compared with Essilor's optical technology orientation, Luxottica is more famous for its sunglasses business as an agent for fashion brands, including Bulgari, Burberry, Chanel, Dolce&Gabbana, MiuMiu, Prada, Ralph Lauren, etc. Before merging with Essilor, Luxottica had established more than 70 independent stores for its Ray-Ban brand in the Chinese market.

According to reports, the merger was proposed by Essilor. The retail terminal profit margin of the eyewear industry is extremely high, but the high profit of eyewear is not entirely in the hands of manufacturers, but through layers of distributors, skyrocketing in the middle link, and ultimately leading to high prices for consumers. Therefore, Essilor believes that it is not enough to just provide lenses to brands, and it needs to establish its own brand and directly face consumers.

Essilor has no self-owned brands and no intention to create its own brands. Luxottica already has 12 self-owned brands including Ray-Ban, Revo, Sferoflex and Vogue-Eyewear. In addition, Essilor hopes to get some fashion genes from Luxottica's long-term experience in cooperating with fashion brands.

Traditional eyewear sales channels are complicated, traditional eyewear manufacturers have penetrated deeply enough into the market, and the old model is difficult to break.Even if Essilor wants to establish sales channels and brand image in the traditional eyewear industry, it needs to do so through mergers and acquisitions, not to mention technology companies that are even further away from traditional industries.

What was favored by Essilor back then is also what Meta and Google are competing for now.

02

Google and Meta

Why the fight for Ray-Ban?

What Google and Meta are competing for is Ray-Ban's mature sales channels and brand value.

In terms of sales channels, according to the official website of Ray-Ban Eyewear, Ray-Ban has 257 directly-operated stores in the United States. In addition, a large number of non-directly-operated certified stores and high-quality certified stores are also eligible to sell "Ray-Ban Meta". Such a high store penetration rate gives potential consumers more opportunities to experience it offline.

Ray-Ban's store network in the United States | Image source: Screenshot of Ray-Ban's official website

As for brand value, it may sound vague, but it actually has a real impact on consumers: Ray-Ban’s high brand awareness is one thing, and Ray-Ban’s long-term accumulation of market share, brand awareness, and user credibility has given it a certain degree of product pricing power. The base price of a pair of Ray-Ban glasses is $199, which gives the public a basic understanding of what kind of glasses they can buy for $199. On this basis, the “Ray-Ban Meta” is priced at $299, which means that for an additional $100, you can enjoy the latest AI glasses with a large model, and this pricing becomes more acceptable to users psychologically.

This is also why traditional brands that have already grown in size have become more valuable. Mature brands have reached the public and educated the market through multiple levels such as offline channel construction, brand awareness, product form, and consumer psychological price. At this point, the only thing merchants have to do is to make the product well, set a reasonable price, and leave the rest to the market.

But the issue of making good products has been a problem for technology giants for a long time.

Ever since Google released its first smart glasses, Google Glass, in 2012, technology companies have never stopped experimenting with smart glasses for more than a decade.

Entrepreneurs and investors have always loved to hear that "smart glasses are the perfect hardware form of AI." In stark contrast to the enthusiastic trend in the venture capital and technology circles, consumers have always been tepid. Except for geek enthusiasts who spend real money to experience every latest product, the sales of smart glasses, no matter which company produces them, are not optimistic.

One of the key reasons is actually easy to understand now: cool in the eyes of technology companies ≠ fashionable and useful in the eyes of consumers.

In the past few years, the so-called daily-wear smart glasses that have appeared on the market have always had some shortcomings in terms of product appearance, such as overly thick temples and frames that are 2-3 times wider than normal frames... All of these make consumers feel psychologically burdened when they see them for the first time.

It wasn't until September 2023 that Meta and Ray-Ban jointly released the second-generation co-branded smart glasses "Ray-Ban Meta".

While the hardware of "Ray-Ban Meta" has been upgraded, its weight does not exceed 50 grams, making it light and comfortable to wear.

In addition, "Ray-Ban Meta" is also very mature in appearance design. It uses the best-selling classic style in Ray-Ban's history, launches three new colors of transparent frames, and provides more than 150 frame and lens combinations on the Ray-Ban Remix platform, greatly satisfying consumers' personalized needs when selecting products.

It can be seen that under the control of Ray-Ban glasses, "Ray-Ban Meta" has not given up the pursuit of beauty and comfort, and meets the most basic requirements of consumers for a pair of glasses. After all, smart glasses are not only high-tech products, but also part of our daily life. Through reasonable technical integration, "Ray-Ban Meta" successfully integrates smart functions into the design and provides a better user experience.

It is conceivable that not only in the eyewear industry, as "AI+hardware" redefines smart products, the value of brands that have deep accumulation in other hardware categories will be highlighted.The "value" of brands that we often talk about is being magnified. Ray-Ban may be just the beginning. It may become a trend for excellent hardware manufacturers to become the object of competition for cooperation among technology companies.

03

The smart glasses war is back

Google VS Meta

As we mentioned earlier, Meta and Ray-Ban have collaborated to develop two generations of smart glasses: "Ray-Ban Stories" and "Ray-Ban Meta", and the sales and reputation of the two are very different.

Thanks to the Qualcomm Snapdragon AR1 chip and its built-in end-side model, the response speed of "Ray-Ban Meta" in multimodal interaction has reached the point where it can give answers within seconds; and Meta's Llama 3 AI model provides the strongest support for its recognition capabilities.

In comparison, the AI ​​function of "Ray-Ban Stories" is much weaker. In fact, there was no large AI model two years ago. The speed of technological advancement is amazing.

Do you still remember the complaints about Google Glass 10 years ago? Overheating, hotness, unnatural monocular focusing, and a "sky-high price" of $1,500... The comprehensive technical level 10 years ago could hardly meet the needs of hardware design, and it is naturally incomparable with today.

There has always been an "impossible triangle" theory in the hardware field: under certain technical conditions, it is difficult to balance performance, size and price. If you want to achieve the extreme of two of them, the third factor will definitely not be satisfactory.

But "Ray-Ban Meta" has initially balanced these three points.

「Ray-Ban Meta」Success today suggests the emergence of large models is changing the rules of the game for smart glasses.

In addition to products like AVP, Meta Quest, and Magic Leap that pursue the ultimate spatial display and human-computer interaction experience, lightweight and fashionable smart glasses driven by artificial intelligence interaction may also come onto the stage of the times like the Apple Watch did back then, and will be the first to be accepted by the market because they solve the pain point of long-term outdoor wear of smart glasses.

Of course, the shortcomings of "Ray-Ban Meta" still exist, such as limited user groups, linear output, learning costs for wake-up words and commands, battery life anxiety, etc., which make it not yet capable of heavy use. However, the multi-modal interaction capabilities provided by the latest technology and its wearable comfort still greatly increase its imagination in the direction of AI.

Therefore, it is not difficult to understand the involvement of Google mentioned in the news at the beginning. After all, smart glasses were first proposed by Google, and they are definitely Google's concern. At this year's Google I/O conference, in conjunction with the release of multimodal Project Astra, Google launched a new type of smart glasses.

In fact, Meta and Google are not the only two tech giants. The hot sales of the second-generation "Ray-Ban Meta" have brought a new batch of potential smart glasses teams in the industry to enter the field, and the excitement seems to have returned to the heyday of VR in 2016. However, whether startups are able to compete with large companies is still a question.

Among the many product forms and tracks of AI hardware, smart glasses are still a very important one. The maturity of technology makes it once again the one that is likely to win in the end among AI hardware.

Also this week, EssilorLuxottica agreed to acquire the US streetwear brand Supreme for $1.5 billion, and the acquisition is expected to be completed by the end of the year. It is reported that EssilorLuxottica plans to cooperate with Meta to launch a new version of Supreme smart sunglasses to better attract young consumers.

The war for smart glasses may have just begun.

*Header image source: Ray-Ban official website

This article is an original article from Geek Park. For reprinting, please contact Geek Jun on WeChat: geekparkGO

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