Following the announcement of VF Corp.’s streetwear brand Supreme being acquired by EssilorLuxottica, both the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta was in talks to acquire a 5 percent stake in the eyewear group. The news sent EssilorLuxottica’s share price back up after a 4.5 percent drop following the Supreme announcement. Neither Meta nor EssilorLuxottica confirmed the information at the time of publishing.
Based on EssilorLuxottica’s current market capitalization of around €90 billion, Meta would invest between €4.5 and €5.0 billion, a relatively small amount for the US giant whose market value exceeds $1.2 trillion, according to WSJ. Both groups have been partnering since 2020 to develop their Meta Ray-Ban co-branded smart eyewear and have made smart eyewear a strategic priority. Considering their complementary know-how, such an investment would make sense in this context.
However, Meta may have more pressing reasons to invest in EssilorLuxottica. According to The Verge, Google has approached the eyewear group about putting its Gemini AI assistant in future smart glasses. In a recent video on its YouTube channel, Google showed a prototype glasses device embarking the AI system. The tech giant also recently joined the AR Alliance, an international body regrouping companies and organizations in the augmented reality hardware sector, triggering speculations that it was returning to the smart eyewear sector only about one year after the termination of its Google Glass project, which EssilorLuxottica was also involved with.
Still, according to The Verge, these are all signs that the smart eyewear market is heating up. Quoting anonymous sources in the supply chain, the website stressed that smart glasses shipments were on track to reach millions of pieces in the next couple of years based on the current growth pace.
SGI Europe’s sister publication Eyewear Intelligence believes that the surprising acquisition of Supreme might actually be part of EssilorLuxottica’s smart eyewear strategy. The streetwear brand’s core customer group – young, hyper-connected, influential – and expertise in online buzz creation could be accelerating factors in consumers’ adoption of smart eyewear.
