Meta Goes Offline To Sell Its Online Dreams

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.