How Meta designed its new eyewear to appeal to smart glasses skeptics

FastCompany: Meta is now a fashion brand. Today, the tech company launched a new collection of smart glasses designed for the first time in-house and manufactured by its longtime partner EssilorLuxottica . “This is the first step of Meta taking a really hard pass at becoming relevant in the fashion glasses world,” Peter Bristol, the VP of Industrial Design at Meta, said during a press briefing yesterday.

“I hope to earn that right with the products that we ship.” [Photo: Meta] The silhouettes are archetypal—a squarish rectangle (the Meta Adventurer), a chunkier squarish rectangle (the Meta Fury), and a slim oval (the Meta Starfire Kylie Edition, a collaboration with Kylie Jenner). Each is designed to flatter a wide range of faces. [Photos: Meta] Bringing design in house “allows just a little bit more flexibility in terms of price tiering and feature decisions over time,” Bristol tells Fast Company .

“There is no world where one brand is sufficient to bring smart glasses to the right kind of breadth in the world.” The collection starts at $299. Tech companies have been racing to corner the smart glasses market, and they’re doing it by normalizing the aesthetic. Gone are the days when these wearables resembled a cyborg’s appendage. Today’s smart glasses are increasingly indistinguishable fashion glasses without technology.

Meta has been working with EssilorLuxottica (which owns Ray-Ban , Oakley, and Persol) since 2019; Google recently announced partnerships with Samsung, Warby Parker and Gentle Monster on a series of fashion-forward frames to help encourage adoption. On the other end of the spectrum, last week, Snap released Specs , a hulking pair of AR glasses that don’t rely on a smartphone for computing power and support spatial apps. [Photo: Meta] The move into smart glasses has been successful for Meta. Last year, Meta and EssilorLuxottica sold 7 million pairs of AI glasses.

In January, Bloomberg reported that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg wanted to increase its production capacity to 20 million pairs by the end of 2026. For Meta, the adoption of smart glasses goes hand-in-hand with the adoption of artificial intelligence. “We’re at the front end of agents becoming incredibly valuable in your life,” Bristol said during a Q&A at the collection’s launch. “The glasses right now are almost like they’re being set up to be the vehicle for an incredible agent relationship.

I think of it like public transportation—people will use it when it’s good enough.” As a design challenge for Meta, that translates to integrating the technology into your life so seamlessly that it essentially becomes an always-on feature versus an episodic use case. “Getting them to become daily drivers is really critical,” Bristol says. [Photo: Meta] That’s where fashion comes in. There’s been vocal opposition to Meta’s glasses from people who are concerned about the privacy implications of always-on glasses and the potential to abuse features like facial recognition .

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Meta's strategic pivot to integrate smart glasses into fashion represents a significant shift in both tech and design industries, making it highly impactful and relevant for brand strategy professionals, while the novelty lies in the approach rather than the concept of smart glasses itself.