Tech Giants Partner With Retailers As Smart Glasses Battle Heats Up

In the race to finally convince consumers of the benefits of AR and AI powered smart glasses, the global tech giants are heading back to the future – with stores.

As Google, Apple, Meta and Snap go head to head for what they believe will be a lucrative growth market, three of the four have established store networks to introduce their products to a new generation of consumers – many of whom will not have seen Google’s pioneering but unsuccessful first attempt to create the market.

Meta has partnered with Ray Ban, Apple has its own flagship store network to leverage, while the big headline came when Google recently committed to as much as $150 million with the consumer eyewear company Warby Parker. They are set to jointly develop AI-powered smart glasses based on Android XR and Google has already committed $75 million to Warby Parker’s product development and commercialization costs.

Google will invest an additional $75 million, taking an equity stake in Warby Parker, should the trendy eyewear manufacturer meet certain milestones.

The news immediately turbocharged Warby Parker’s stock price, which is up a little short of a fifth since the announcement after a challenging year to date which means that despite the boost the value is still around 11% off year to date.

Smart Glasses At Warby Parker

In May, Warby Parker announced first-quarter net revenue increased nearly 12% year over year to $223.8 million. It also reported its first positive quarterly net income as a public company, with $3.5 million in income compared with a loss of about $2.7 million in Q1 2024. It also opened 11 net new stores, ending the quarter with 287 locations nationwide.

At the Google I/O 2025 event, Google also announced partnerships with several companies to develop smart glasses with Gemini AI and AR capabilities, including Samsung and uber trendy Korean eyewear retailer Gentle Monster.

Google has no doubt taken a close look at Meta’s smart glasses strategy after the latter found success partnering and investing in the maker of iconic sunglasses brand Ray-Ban to develop its smart glasses. One of the reasons that Ray-Ban and Meta have acheived some success is that the smart glasses, far from the clunky original iterations, have a stylish and familiar design and they are being sold across Ray-Ban’s stores network.

It seems likely that Google will use the same playbook with Warby Parker, taking advantage of the eyewear company’s popular frame designs and its growing network of retail stores and online presence around the country.

In announcing the collaboration, Warby Parker and Google said that they intend to launch a series of products over time and forecast that their first line of eyewear will launch “after 2025” and will incorporate multimodal AI with prescription and non-prescription glasses.

Snap Smart Glasses

Meantime, Snap has announced its own plans to release a sixth-generation of its augmented reality glasses next year. The company behind Snapchat said that its next-generation glasses will be called Specs, marking a break from the company’s Spectacles branding that it has used for prior versions of its wearable devices.

Specs will use AR technology to let wearers see and interact with digital imagery overlaid over the physical world and its new glasses will be smaller and lighter than their predecessors, the company said, with Snap’s most recent Spectacles released in September 2024 to developers only.

Those glasses were made available under a leasing model that required users to commit to paying $99 a month for a full year.

Apple is also working on its own smart glasses, based on chips used in the Apple Watch that require less energy than the components in some of its other products like the iPhone, iPad and Mac, but they may not hit the market until sometime in 2027.

Apple has already leveraged its store network to launch a host of products and updates and will be able to use those stores again to provide a platform for its smart glasses technology when it finally arrives.