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这条还没译成中文，下面是英文原文。
Snap's Spectacles: $40 million of hype, 220,000 pairs sold
Camera-glasses sold from vending machines at $130, Snap built hype faster than product — $40 million in excess inventory and write-downs.
Snap Inc. · 2017-11-07
怎么回事
Spectacles were Snap's first real hardware: sunglasses with a built-in camera that shot 10-second circular iPhone-only videos, unveiled in September 2016 and released in November 2016 at $130. To create buzz, Snap launched them through 'Snapbot' vending machines that appeared in unexpected places — a pop-up bus in Venice Beach, a vending machine in New York — and for a moment the scarcity worked: people queued for hours and resold pairs for hundreds of dollars.
The scarcity was inventory that never came. Snap bet the launch narrative on being hard to find, then pulled the product everywhere without checking whether the crowds would still be there. By late 2017 the drop-offs caught up: Snap recorded a nearly $40 million charge for excess Spectacles inventory and wrote down a purchase commitment, and the company admitted it had sold just over 150,000 pairs in the previous quarter. As of May 2018 the total was about 220,000 pairs — 'less than expected' — against the hundreds of thousands Snap had ordered.
The gap between the queue and the cash register is the whole case. Snap manufactured a year's worth of demand stories and only a fraction of demand. The product line did not die — Spectacles 2, 3 and 4 followed — but the lesson of the first run was printed in the third-quarter 2017 accounts: hype is a marketing function, not an inventory plan.
为什么会这样
- The launch treated scarcity as the product: vending machines and limited drops built a line outside, but the people inside the line were buying a story, not a camera anyone had tested against a phone.
- Snap ordered to the level of the hype rather than the evidence of repeat use — when the drop-off came, hundreds of thousands of units sat as a $40 million write-down.
- The camera-glasses solved a problem the phone already solved: a $130 second device whose only advantage was a lens you wore, aimed at customers who photographed their own screens.
教训
Hype is a marketing function, not an inventory plan. Snap built a queue with engineered scarcity and ordered to the line, not the demand — a $40 million write-down for a product people queued for.
后来呢
Snap recorded a nearly $40 million charge for excess Spectacles inventory and a purchase commitment in its Q3 2017 earnings, reported November 7 2017. Spectacles continued as a line — Spectacles 2, 3 and 4 followed — but the original run became a case study in demand that the hype outran.
资料来源
- The Verge — Snapchat's Spectacles are in a $40 million pile of unsold inventory (Nov 2017)
- Wikipedia — Spectacles (product)
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