Spectacles Launch

In 2016, Spectacles introduced the world to Snap's first piece of hardware, and it did it in the most Snap way possible. There was no big-box launch. Instead, a teaser campaign ran out of home, and then the glasses dropped only through Snapbots: bright yellow vending machines that appeared in one location at a time, for a single day, before vanishing to the next. The whole concept was built in-house and in secret, leaning into the "drop economy" by limiting supply to spark demand. The mission behind it was simple and a little magical: send people to the most beautiful, hard-to-reach places in the world, so their very first Snaps with Spectacles would be worth remembering. It worked. Crowds lined up for hours, $129 glasses resold for thousands on eBay, and the campaign hit its goal of matching the first iPod's 100,000-unit debut through limited distribution alone, within nine months and without selling a single pair online. All of it built the momentum Snap wanted heading into its 2017 IPO.

This was my first project out of college. Snap Inc. didn't really exist yet: this was still a scrappy startup team inside Snapchat, an outgrowth of Snap's acquisition of the smart-glasses startup Vergence Labs, and I was one of only two visual designers on it. Because everything was so new, I was handed an unusually wide range of the launch: out of home, the website, the experiential design of the pop-ups, the Snapbot's own on-device experience, packaging, support visuals, and film. It was the kind of everything-all-at-once start you only get on a team small enough to let you build it as you go.

The Spectacles eye logo and our original brand guide came from the legendary studio Sagmeister & Walsh, and I had the pleasure of working directly with their team on our brand assets and the website.