After betting billions, MetaMETA

decided that selling virtual worlds requires something ironically analog. Less than three years after its metaverse rebrand, the company is leveraging a brick-and-mortar playbook to boost hardware sales — expanding its retail footprint to compete in the wearables frontier.

• Meta sold 1M+ Ray-Ban Smart Glasses in 2024, a “great start” that didn’t “move the needle” yet, per CEO Mark Zuckerberg — while exploring earbuds, watches, and an Oakley glasses partnership.
• The Quest VR owner expects try-before-you-buy to drive broader adoption — so it hired The RealReal’sREAL
  ex-CEO and dedicated 50+ employees to oversee the retail experience.

Looking ahead: AppleAAPL

is reportedly launching AI glasses by 2026, while GoogleGOOG

partners with Warby Parker, signaling the tech industry’s shift beyond smartphones toward wearables. With Zuckerberg calling 2025 a year to prove whether AI glasses become a “really prominent computing platform,” Meta faces the challenge of replicating Apple’s magic rather than following Microsoft’sMSFT

failed retail experiment. This store push could determine if Meta leads the post-smartphone era or becomes another hardware footnote.