Meta’s Ray-Bans have sold two million pairs — its maker is prepping to sell 10M each year

Two weeks ago, we exclusively reported Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks on how many pairs of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses the company had recently sold and might theoretically sell — 1 million pairs in 2024, with the possibility of reaching 2 million or even 5 million by the end of 2025. But glasses giant EssilorLuxottica, which produces those glasses for Meta, has now publicly revealed 2 million pairs of Meta Ray-Bans have sold since their October 2023 debut, and that it’s aiming to produce 10 million Meta glasses each year by the end of 2026. “A pair of eyeglasses will be the main digital platform addressing our daily needs,” EssilorLuxottica CEO and chairman Francesco Milleri said on the company’s FY2024 financial results call (via UploadVR). Milleri specified that the 2 million figure was sales since 2023, so that probably doesn’t include the original Ray-Ban Stories that arrived in 2021. Milleri says his company is “planning for the long term with Meta” and thinking about Meta’s Ray-Bans as a “shared platform” that’s “ready to embark on third-party brands,” not just a single product. Bloomberg reported last month that Meta is planning Oakley-branded glasses too. (Oakley is one of EssilorLuxottica’s many other brands.) “In the light of such evolution, and in line with our ambitious plan, we are currently expanding our production capacity for Ray-Ban Meta, set to reach 10 million annual unit by the end of next year,” Milleri said on the call. In September, the two companies announced a long-term partnership through at least 2030. Milleri suggested that all of Meta’s glasses would be “supported by AI,” hinted that subscription services are coming as well, and said EssilorLuxottica is looking forward to Meta’s multimodal AI features expanding worldwide. My colleague Victoria Song recently tested Meta’s new Live AI and live translation features for the Meta Ray-Bans, and found both features intriguing but not quite ready for primetime — but we’ve called the glasses themselves a “turning point”, and clones were everywhere at CES. Meta is spending big to make its glasses a hit, paying for not one but two Super Bowl ads and a limited edition Super Bowl set of the shades, and it just hired the former CEO of luxury goods site The RealReal as its new VP of retail for wearables. To become “the main digital platform addressing our daily needs,” Meta and EssilorLuxottica would need to grow glasses by two orders of magnitude; Samsung and Apple each sell over 200 million phones per year. Ten million per year would barely scratch that surface. Meta is reportedly working on a pair of glasses with a display for later in 2025; my colleague Alex Heath has written it will ship alongside a neural wristband you can use to control it.