By Meghan Bobrowsky and Isabella Simonetti | Photographs by Emma Rose Milligan for WSJ

NEW YORK -- If there is one thing Meta knows how to do, it is getting people to take pictures and share them with friends. That was top of mind for Matt Jacobson when he was designing the company's new retail pop-up stores.

"We want people to take pictures. We want them to come with their friends. We don't want them in and out of the store quickly," Jacobson, Meta's vice president and creative director for AI wearables, said in an interview. Meta has been on a pop-up shop spree since last year after its Ray-Ban AI glasses became a surprise hit. Jacobson helped set up stores in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Burlingame, Calif., and most recently New York City.

The latest one, which opened Friday on a busy block in Midtown Manhattan, is hard to miss. It is a 5,000-square-foot, two-story building that has been painted bright blue and adorned with an outline of Meta's Ray-Ban AI glasses.

Inside the skateboarding-themed space, all of Meta's smartglasses and virtual-reality headsets are on display. There is a station with free cookies and coffee and an engraving stand to brand the glasses cases with initials or designs.

Jacobson said he designed the space to be both Instagrammable and just somewhere people could hang out. "It wouldn't feel right for us to build just a super clean, super efficient, selling-returning machine," he said.

The New York pop-up is on Fifth Avenue, the Vegas one is in the Wynn hotel and the L.A. one -- which is permanent -- is on Melrose Avenue. "We wanted places that had great foot traffic," Jacobson said.

The locations in L.A. and Vegas also have skateboard themes, with the decor in each customized to the city. The stores feature full-length mirrors that Jacobson says customers have been using both for trying on the glasses and for taking selfies.

The glasses became popular last year after a first version released in 2021 flopped. The glasses, made in collaboration with Italian eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica, come in different styles and are equipped with a camera, microphones and AI features. As of earlier this year, Meta had sold more than two million of them.

The company doesn't release sales figures for the glasses. Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in its most recent earnings call that "strong AI glasses revenue" contributed to revenue growth in that quarter and that the company was expecting significant year-over-year growth in AI-glasses revenue in the current quarter.

At Meta's annual developer conference in September, Zuckerberg revealed a new smartglasses product, with a built-in display that can be controlled via a wrist band. On the earnings call last month, Zuckerberg said the glasses sold out in every store within 48 hours and that demo slots had been fully booked through the end of November.

"This is an area where we're clearly leading and have a huge opportunity ahead," he said. "So we're going to have to invest in increasing manufacturing and selling more of those."

On Friday morning, a mix of customers and employees trickled into the newly opened Manhattan store. The crowd was sparse, and there was no line to enter. (Meta's official launch party for the store is next week.)

Father and daughter Matt Lahey, 58, and Katie Gerber, 27, noticed the store while walking past and decided to pop in.

"I'm very interested in them for the language-translation part," Lahey, who lives in Jacksonville, Fla., said. "I think that's gonna be cool and, you know, when we travel, that's always sort of the limiting factor when we travel internationally."

Jacobson says the company plans to open more stores in the next two years -- both domestically and internationally -- and that the themes will change several times a year.

Write to Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com and Isabella Simonetti at isabella.simonetti@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 15, 2025 07:00 ET (12:00 GMT)

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