Saul Martinez | Bloomberg | Getty Images
A customer displays a pair of Snapchat Spectacles by Snap Inc. for a photograph inside the company’s pop-up store in New York, U.S., on Monday, Dec. 5, 2016.
While the New York City location will close, the Snapbot vending machines will continue to pop up from time to time, Snapchat’s parent company, Snap, told CNBC.
The large-scale Spectacles launch comes as Snap readies to trade its stock publicly on the New York Stock Exchange. The Venice, Calif.-based photo messaging start-up told investors that Spectacles are the latest effort to “reinvent the camera.”
The glasses have “not generated significant revenue” for Snap yet, and the costs are expected to keep exceeding sales in the near future, the company said. And since the company relies on a single contract manufacturer for the product, it can only make so many at a time, according to Snap’s regulatory filings.
While the glasses have proven to be great marketing, they also show that Snap could take its augmented reality expertise beyond the scope of an app, virtual reality experts have told CNBC.
