Snapchat's owner, Snap, has gone public with its IPO filing. According to the S-1 document the company has filed, it is planning to take its hardware experiment more seriously this year.
Parent company Snap says that it is planning to "significantly broaden the distribution of Spectacles."
No other details were made available, but Snap says that it is willing to invest more to successfully market and distribute the product to a wider audience this year.
"In 2017, we expect to continue to make substantial investments in inventory, marketing, distribution, and product innovation as we assess product demand," says Snap in its S-1 filing.
Distribution Strategy For Spectacles A Huge Success
This is certainly great news for those who have been trying to get their hands on a pair since last year.
Snapchat's Spectacles were launched in September 2016 and were a big hit last holiday season. Unfortunately, the product was very hard to come by.
Instead of providing the sunglasses to tech reviewers and coming up with a mass consumer launch, the company only sold them through yellow pop-up vending machines randomly placed in different cities.
The exclusivity generated a hype, as the product was resold in sites like eBay in extremely marked up prices. Snap says that the said product "has not generated significant revenue," but that is to be expected due to its limited availability.
Snapchat Spectacles vs Google Glass
Spectacles are frequently being compared to Google's failed smartglasses project, the Google Glass, but it is an entirely different animal. The product is simpler, less complicated, and a whole lot cheaper. A pair can be bought for only $130, which is ridiculously cheaper than the Google Glass, which came with a price tag of $1,500 when it was launched.
At its core, Spectacles is basically a pair of sunglasses that sports a tiny camera on its right side and has the ability to connect directly to your smartphone. Once you put it on, the sunglasses allow you to shoot 10- to 30-second wide-angle video clips. The sunglasses will then directly post the videos in your Snapchat account in a circular format that you can rotate at any angle when displayed in full screen mode.
The Spectacles are Snap's first venture into hardware and the company's second product after Snapchat. With many developers cloning Snapchat (we're looking at you, Instagram), we're hoping that the success of Spectacles may sustain the initial success of the company.
