[drzaiusapelord]

I'm very surprised how feminine this design is. It has strong overtures towards 50's cat-eye frames and looks exclusively marketed to women. I just ran through all the media/PR stuff I could find for this and can't find any official photos of a man wearing them. I wonder if they would have better luck also selling a male-fashion oriented model. This isn't a hypothetical as I would probably pick these up for ease of vacation photos/videos, especially for those of us with active children who are difficult to photograph well. I'd much rather wear these on a boat than try to take a video or photo with my $700 smartphone begging to end up on the bottom of the Atlantic.

Most of the reviews on amazon are from men and most of those complain about the style or being too small, so clearly men were very motivated to buy this product.

I think there's a fundamental marketing mistake here with wearable cameras. Its not really going to appeal to sexy instagram addicts who can't selfie with them, but to busy parents and older people, especially those with limited mobility or inability to quickly pull out a smartphone. I think its obvious that those kinds of markets don't bring in SV money, so here we are pretending women actually want to buy and wear these ridiculous looking things all day. Sorry, but the huge graphics around the lens mar an otherwise tasteful design. Clearly the market chose against this concept.

I'm also skeptical an always facing camera, be it on glasses, wearable watch/pedant, etc will ever be socially acceptable. Apparently, the Google Glasses problem hasn't been solved yet and may not ever be solved in the consumer space.

>Snaps from Spectacles do not directly go to your phone. You can save Snaps taken with Spectacles to your phone by exporting them from Snapchat Memories to your Camera roll

Also the implementation sounds wonky. I'm guessing this is a iOS limitation? On Android you should be able to write directly to the camera folder.

[softwarefounder]

You seem to be getting down-voted, maybe by the feminine comment, but you're right; it's clear that their marketing is towards women (https://www.spectacles.com/), and they're missing a huge market. (Why not two styles?)

Edit: Imagine if they would've had a male styled version, and tried to get Kanye West, or some other pop/style star wearing them.

Huge miss.

[ghostly_s]

Imagine it they would've done a female styled version, and got Kim Kardashian wearing them? Why is that less legitimate? The parent is being downvoted because of the implicit criticism is that a female-first targeted rollout is a mistake.

[_uhtu]

I think the parent would have drawn the same criticism if the exclusively marketed towards men.

I think his point was simply that their marketing misses 50% of the market. His point is not that it's wrong to only market towards women, his point was that it seems weird from a revenue perspective to only market to to half the population.

[caseydurfee]

A lot of products start with half the population, though, and it's not considered weird. The old euphemism is "shrink it and pink it" - originally design for men, then put out a women's version.

If Spectacles take off, they can always "grow it and bro it" later. Starting off with a focused target market seems like a reasonable approach to me.

[noitsnot]

The demographics of revenue or ad generating snap users might be more telling, but he/she is suggesting that they should have released a male and female version or a gender neutral version. That way you're not missing a massive part of the market, a.k.a. 82 million daily active users if it's an even 50/50 male/female split.

[HillRat]

Influencer demos skew highly female, so I can't say I'm surprised -- Snap isn't selling to the total market so much as trying to get traction through high-influence users. It's a strategy that requires time, patience, and careful execution, but has the potential to normalize something that Google rather famously failed to do so (and potentially poisoned the concept) with Glass.

[drzaiusapelord]

Ironically, my wife wouldn't be caught dead in these partly because she has her own defined style and partly because she's not into gadgets like I am, but I would buy them like I wrote above for vacation-esque purposes.

Sounds like it was a flop regardless, but I do think the 'techy dad' market is viable at the right pricepoint. Not sure how the social aspect would work out, but if it had a red LED running when it was recording I doubt anyone would mind.

[adjkant]

They have very clear circular lighting animations that play when they are recording - more noticeable than a red light actually.