Meta Has Already Won the Smart Glasses Race

At Meta’s Q2 2025 earnings call at the end of July, Mark Zuckerberg didn’t hold back. “If you don’t have glasses that have AI,” he warned, “you’re probably going to be at a pretty significant cognitive disadvantage compared to other people.”

Forget smartphones. According to Zuck, the real interface of the future is what’s sitting on your nose. These AI-powered specs, he argues, will “see what we see, hear what we hear, and talk to us” in real time—offering a kind of digital copilot for everyday life. And if that vision sounds a little dystopian, it’s also very, very lucrative.

Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses—built in collaboration with eyewear juggernaut EssilorLuxottica—have become a surprise hit. Since launching the second generation in October 2023, they’ve sold more than 2 million units. Sales tripled in Q2 2025 alone, helping drive Meta’s 22 percent year-over-year revenue growth. Zuckerberg has reportedly challenged teams to push that figure to 5 million by year’s end.

With the ad business plateauing and VR still mostly a money pit, smart glasses are emerging as a rare hardware product people might actually want. That likely explains the company’s decision to go all in by acquiring an approximately 3 percent equity stake in EssilorLuxottica, which, in addition to Ray-Ban, also makes Oakley, Persol, and Prada glasses, plus many more. It's a transaction that has been valued at $3.5 billion—a move that formally makes Meta a strategic minority shareholder and elevates it beyond its prior role as a technology partner.

Although the investment strengthens Meta’s access to EssilorLuxottica’s manufacturing expertise and retail distribution and makes Meta the glasses maker's second largest shareholder, it is not large enough to grant control or a seat on the board. Reports suggest Meta may increase its stake to around 5 percent over time, signaling deeper commitment rather than takeover.

But why? Meta already had a thriving collaboration with the company via Ray-Ban Stories and Ray-Ban Meta. Why go beyond licensing? Why buy in?

A Seat at the Table

Zuckerberg is betting on smart glasses as the next platform. And platforms, as Meta knows better than anyone, aren’t something you lease.

“An equity stake aligns Meta’s incentives with EssilorLuxottica’s long-term success and deepens the integration between the two firms,” says Bryce Quillin, economist and co-founder of luxury strategy agency It’s A Working Title. “Rather than one-off licensing sales, the equity stake signals a shared roadmap.”

Meta wants a seat at the table, not just a place in the showroom. And a 3 percent stake buys visibility into R&D, influence over product timelines and a foot in the door on decisions around how tech and design evolve together. “This will give Meta a role in determining timelines and feature prioritization for smart glasses,” Quillin adds. “An initial, roughly 3 percent stake is meaningful—enough to influence strategic direction and product priorities.” And in a category this nascent, that kind of influence is essential.

“It's about ensuring that EssilorLuxottica also prioritizes smart glasses as a business. After all, it's quite a large company that isn't as focused on tech as Meta,” agrees Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

But platform bets aren’t just about what goes inside the glasses, they’re also about where and how those glasses get into customers’ hands. “One of the biggest advantages, beyond the obvious design capabilities and brand portfolio, is EssilorLuxottica’s global network of stores and support,” says Sag. “Wearables are deeply personal. Getting the fit right, balancing the product properly and supporting the customer—that’s where they shine.”

You can’t just build smart glasses and drop them on Amazon. You need fitting. You need prescriptions. You need a customer service experience that doesn’t involve a chatbot. Apple already owns that infrastructure through its global retail empire. Meta doesn’t. EssilorLuxottica offers an express lane to that level of support.

“The most important thing EssilorLuxottica brings to the table, beyond its brands like Ray-Ban and Oakley, is its retail distribution power,” agrees Luca Solca, global luxury goods sector head at Bernstein. “That should be particularly valuable for companies like Meta or Google, who don’t have any physical distribution to speak of, unlike Apple.”

Meta has the software. EssilorLuxottica has the storefronts. And in a product category that must be fitted, adjusted, prescribed—and, yes, fashion-matched—that retail network is gold.

Smart Specs, Meet Fashion World

The Ray-Ban Meta glasses are a success largely because they look like Ray-Bans. That sounds obvious, but in the world of wearable tech, aesthetics have killed more ideas than poor battery life. Frames are fashion. No one wants to wear a prototype on their face.

That’s where EssilorLuxottica comes in. “It gives [Meta] an edge, because they picked the company that owns and partners with the most licensed fashion brands,” says Sag. “Google has Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, but that’s not the same as having Ray-Ban, Oakley, Prada, Chanel, and many others.”

EssilorLuxottica owns, manufactures, and distributes more than a third of the global eyewear market. In tech terms, it's the operating system of the glasses world—the infrastructure layer on which most of the industry runs. That makes it an incredibly valuable ally, especially for a company such as Meta that knows how to build platforms but not necessarily products people want to wear.

So far, the Meta-Ray-Ban collaboration has been surprisingly effective. Unlike earlier misfires in face-worn tech (remember Google Glass? ​​Snap Spectacles?), these glasses actually look like ... glasses. “Ray-Ban’s Wayfarers are an iconic, mass-market design that lends itself well to the inclusion of tech,” says Jitesh Ubrani, research manager at WW Device Trackers. “But other styles don’t offer enough space for the tech. Adding displays presents further challenges, a larger battery adds weight, and extra processing generates heat.”

There's a reason the first successful smart specs look like they're from the 1950s. That extra thickness isn’t just retro flair, it’s hiding a processor and a battery. But that technical constraint creates a creative opportunity: In the right frame, smart tech can disappear. And transforming functional, medical-grade eyewear—like prescription glasses—into stylish, mass-market fashion accessories is exactly what EssilorLuxotica does best.

Still, blending smart tech with high fashion isn’t without risk. Do those two worlds really want to share a nose bridge? “Meta and EssilorLuxottica hope this collaboration will be one of the first successful attempts to integrate high-tech applications, like AI, into luxury products,” says Quillin, “While the Ray-Ban partnership appears successful so far, it’s unclear whether consumers will embrace tech features built into high-end products like Prada, Chanel, or Versace eyewear.”

Meta, for its part, is betting on convergence. The company sees a future where fashion and tech are inseparable. In a note titled “Personal Superintelligence,” Zuckerberg imagined a future where “personal devices like glasses that understand our context—because they can see what we see, hear what we hear and interact with us throughout the day—will become our primary computing devices.” That vision of AI-integrated eyewear shows just how deeply Meta believes the future will be both wearable and always on.

We might see the first glimpse of Zuckerberg's wearable future as soon as September. Bloomberg reports that this is when Meta will unveil its latest smart glasses, complete with a heads-up display, that will supposedly drop later this fall with a starting price of around $800.

The Competitive Firewall

Still, while Meta may have taken the first credible swing at consumer-grade smart specs, it’s hardly alone. Google has quietly rebooted its wearable ambitions after the much-memed demise of Google Glass, acquiring smart-glasses startup North in 2020, and reportedly working with manufacturers like Samsung and Qualcomm to develop an XR (extended reality) ecosystem.

Then, in July, Google doubled down with a $100 million investment in Gentle Monster, the South Korean eyewear brand known for its fashion-forward, tech-ready designs. Together, they’re developing a next-gen pair of smart glasses that will supposedly fuse AI capabilities with high-end aesthetics—less cyborg, more catwalk.

Apple, true to form, is trying to play the long game. The Vision Pro was never meant to live on your face full-time, but it’s a stepping stone. In choosing to tackle the far trickier problem of fully immersive VR first, Apple effectively bet on the wrong horse—pouring effort into a technology that’s dazzled reviewers but hasn’t won over the average consumer.

Meta, by contrast, staked out a beachhead with simpler AR glasses that looked like something people might actually wear in public. Now, reports from Bloomberg and The Information suggest Apple is working on lighter, more wearable AR glasses, though they may be years from release. When they do arrive, Apple will have the advantage of polished software and its own global retail footprint, while Meta is racing to secure the same distribution advantage via EssilorLuxottica.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, meanwhile, has long bet on AR. Snap has invested more than $3 billion over the past 11 years to build its own AR platform. Meta, by contrast, spends more than that every quarter through its Reality Labs division, which is focused on both AR and VR—but still, Snap’s persistence underscores just how long the runway is for this market.

Then there’s the wild card: China. ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, has invested in XR, acquiring VR headset maker Pico and releasing its own smart glasses in select markets. Xiaomi and Huawei have also entered the fray, blending AI and camera functions into (relatively) stylish frames that are increasingly indistinguishable from standard eyewear. They may not be targeting Western luxury consumers yet, but rapid iteration in China’s massive domestic market could well produce breakout hardware standards that later go global.

Calling Dibs

There’s also the matter of preemptive exclusivity. With rumors that other tech giants were eyeing EssilorLuxottica, Meta’s investment in the Ray-Ban maker functions as a strategic lock-in—a corporate version of calling dibs. “I heard competitors like Google were sniffing around, and this partnership was Meta’s way of cementing a long-term relationship,” says Sag.

At its core, this move by Meta, Google, Apple, Xiaomi, Huawei, and others is a race to define the hardware and distribution model for a post-smartphone era before someone else does. By securing the world’s largest eyewear maker, with its unmatched retail footprint and deep portfolio of luxury brands, Meta is building both a moat and a launchpad.

“Apple and Google will certainly have an easier path forward thanks to Meta’s early and extremely large investment in this category,” says Ubrani. “However, Meta’s edge may not be in hardware. Rather, it’s in design and distribution since they’ve partnered with the largest eyewear maker in the world.”

“Beyond that, Meta also has an extremely successful social network to promote their glasses,” says Ubrani, “and that will remain a competitive advantage. That said, smart glasses will have to offer a great software experience, too—and so far there isn’t a clear winner in that space.”

In the end, the real prize isn’t just winning the smart-glasses race, it’s owning the platform that comes after smartphones. To win that future, you don’t just need AI and hardware—you need trust, taste and territory. Apple has the stores. Google has the search. Meta has your friends. But EssilorLuxottica has your face. And in a wearable-first world, that might be the most valuable real estate of all.