Meta’s push to make their smart glasses cool

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**Meghan McCarty Carino** (0:31)
Can Meta finally make smart glasses cool? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Meghan McCarty Carino.
Like Google Glass before them, the first generation of Meta Ray-Bans were decidedly uncool. But sales have been gaining steam, and new collaborations with pop culture figures like Kylie Jenner have launched the glasses into the zeitgeist. Carrie Battan recently wrote for New York Magazine about Teyana's quest to make these wearables more appealing to women and consumers outside the tech bubble.

**Carrie Battan** (1:16)
The original Meta Ray-Bans, I believe they were first conceived in 2019, and they were launched in 2021 I mean, I think the bottom line is that nobody was the consumer of those glasses because they were really unpopular and, you know, kind of widely considered to be a sales flop. But the people who did buy them seemed to be mostly sort of gadget nerds who were interested in trying them out, just kind of as an experiment.

**Meghan McCarty Carino** (1:45)
So how has Meta shifted its strategy around its smart glasses potentially to appeal to women?

**Carrie Battan** (1:51)
They've taken a bunch of paths. They've really amped up the technical capabilities of the glasses, did a huge AI integration, as well as adding live stream capability.
Another thing that they've done in the last couple of years first, they expanded into the sort of like outdoorsy POV adventure group by doing this collaboration with Oakley in 2025 And then, you know, in 2025 and 2026, they've really kind of enmeshed themselves in the fashion world. First, by doing a collaboration with a fashion brand called Coperni and sending models down the runway wearing the glasses. And then, more recently, kind of signing kind of like aspirational pop culture figures like Teyana Taylor and Kylie Jenner to promote the glasses.

**Meghan McCarty Carino** (2:44)
Right. So Kylie Jenner had this sort of ad, and she has her own model of the glasses.
Starfire, I think they're called. Yes. And so, yeah, so they put out this sort of ad. It's just like first person video of Kylie's day. How has that been received?

**Carrie Battan** (3:03)
Yeah, I think ultimately it was a pretty big misstep because from my perspective, the Kylie Jenner campaign really increased the visibility of these glasses.
And in making people more aware of them, it also made people way more attuned to all of the potential misuses of these glasses and the privacy concerns. People automatically started turning more critical eye that they maybe hadn't prior to Kylie being involved.

**Meghan McCarty Carino** (3:36)
You spoke to a couple of women who seemed to be on board at one point. What were they using the glasses for?

**Carrie Battan** (3:44)
Yeah, I spoke to a woman who had taken, she had been gifted a pair of glasses by Meta, and she was very excited to take them on a vacation with her family, I believe it was to Europe, and they were doing gondola rides and doing hores around mountains and doing cooking classes and all this, and she thought that that would be a perfect use case. Then I talked to some people who are cooking creators, who were excited to use the glasses while they were cooking, and people who are really interested in gardening, and the Meta glasses are a perfect way to do hands-free taking of a two-handed activity like gardening.

**Meghan McCarty Carino** (4:24)
But it sounds like they ended up getting a bit disenchanted. What happened?

**Carrie Battan** (4:30)
The woman I mentioned who took her glasses on vacation, she went back and reviewed a bunch of the footage a couple months later. One in particular was taken during a cooking class with a bunch of strangers. She had warned to the strangers like, hey, I'm recording, but don't worry, I'm not recording you. What she realized is it was almost impossible to not capture these people, to not be filming them because of the way that the perspective of the lenses are. And she noticed that people were rolling their eyes at her, they were giving her side-eye, and they were whispering to each other, being like, why is this person?