CHICAGO, IL – OCTOBER 09: Carl Edwards Jr. #6 of the Chicago Cubs wears Snapchat glasses while standing in the dugout before game three of the National League Division Series against the Washington Nationals at Wrigley Field on October 9, 2017 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)

Hey, remember Snapchat Spectacles? The sunglasses equipped with cameras that allowed you to record what you were looking at, and post it to Snapchat?

Unsurprisingly, the Spectacles were a giant flop when they were available for sale to the mainstream public, and Business Insider reports that under half of the 150,000 pairs of Spectacles sold were used after the first month.

Snap’s internal data showed that well under half of Spectacles owners continued to use the camera-eqteduipped sunglasses after just four weeks, Business Insider has learned. A person familiar with the data called the retention rate “shockingly low” and added that a sizable percentage of owners would stop using the glasses after just one week.

Naturally, Snapchat claims that they’re thrilled with the response, citing positive Amazon reviews and their internally predicted sales.

A Snap representative declined to comment on the previously unreported data. The representative instead said that Snap has worked to improve how the glasses work through software updates over the past year and is pleased that 73% of reviews for Spectacles on Amazon give the product a five-star rating.

[…]

CEO Evan Spiegel recently said that Snap had sold a total of 150,000 Spectacles, beating the company’s own hope of selling 100,000. “We’re just sort of beginning to dabble in hardware,” he said while onstage at Vanity Fair’s The New Establishment Conference earlier this month.

The company also reportedly has “hundreds of thousands” of unsold Spectacles in a warehouse, “either fully assembled or in parts” according to a report from The Information.

Remember when Snapchat did something that no other app did, and then Instagram added those features and made Snapchat redundant? Yeah. Good luck selling those Spectacles, guys.

[Business Insider]

About Joe Lucia

I hate your favorite team. I also sort of hate most of my favorite teams.