Welcome back to Squawk Box. Warby Parker has unveiled its intelligent eyewear frames developed with Google and Samsung, and joining us right now with more — they're not wearing them, just so you know, folks. Neil Blumenthal is here, Dave Gilboa is here, and they're the co-founders and co-CEOs of Warby Parker. Good morning to both of you. You're wearing some frames, but not the intelligent version. So I think we all know about what Meta's done with their glasses. What do your glasses do? How are they different? And when are we all going to see all this stuff?
Yeah, so we're launching this fall. These are what we believe are really the first truly intelligent eyewear, and we've been looking forward to this moment for years. Do you remember typing into a prompt in a browser and doing any sort of search that we all do every single day? Well, now you can do it just through your glasses. You don't have to take out a computer or a phone. Look at anything, ask any question. We just had a team member who was able to capture his son's first steps using the glasses. I was using it this weekend to figure out whether I should water a plant or move it to put it in a place with more sun. So it's pretty powerful stuff.
And in terms of — so you guys are doing this now with Google and Samsung. Obviously Meta is doing that with Ray-Ban and Oakley and the others. And then you have what we think is Apple trying to do something. Do you think they're going to partner with somebody? And so what does this whole marketplace look like to you in the end?
Yeah. We expect intelligent eyewear to be the next major computing platform, and the moment that you put on our product, it becomes clear that this is a fundamentally more natural and human way to interact with the world than kind of staring down at a screen in your hand. These devices allow you to do the mundane — check your calendar, get directions — while you're engaging with the people around you, or give you superpowers, like being able to understand any language. This weekend I used them to install a car seat, where the glasses identified the make and model of the car seat. I didn't have the manual with me. It was observing how I was installing it.
Putting stuff into the glass itself. So in terms of images into the glass.
Yeah. So our first product will be audio-only, right? They'll have cameras that serve as visual input, speakers, and microphones, and so you can speak to the glasses and they'll speak to you.
How light are they ultimately going to be? The ones that are ultimately going to put images into the glasses for us, so that we're living in this sort of different reality?
Yeah. For us, we come from eyewear designers, and it's really important that they fit great, that they're comfortable, that they're lightweight, that they're designed for all-day, everyday wear. So they'll weigh the same as a normal pair of glasses.
And what about — one of the things that's interesting about what Meta's doing is they actually have a wristband that you have to wear to be able to do certain things with your hands. Similar with you?
So our glasses will be a standalone product that you can interact with by speaking to them. They'll have some tactile functionality.
But in terms of long term, being able to put stuff into the glass, there's a big question about what you can do with your hands to change the interface, right?
Yeah. Over the long term, we don't think that you necessarily need other extra stuff. Exactly.
That's the question. How much do you think this is going to cost? What's the price point going to be?
So we'll share more specifics as we get closer to launch this fall. But like every product by Warby Parker, we expect that they'll deliver tremendous value and be very competitively priced.
What do you think? Your main competitor, I assume, right now would be Meta. Would that be an agreement that that's the one that's the most similar? What is this going to do that's different than that, for example?
Yeah. So this has the power of Google, the power of Gemini behind it. You can ask it any question. We were walking in the office and we randomly saw some balloon animals, and some of our team had used the glasses to teach themselves how to make balloon animals. And I had a meeting, and in between meetings, Dave and I are constantly staring at our phones, trying to quickly read an email or respond to a text. And this way we were able to have our heads up and ask, as we were going from conference room to conference room, how long is it going to take us to get to this meeting in Midtown, for example? And these productivity gains — there's nothing like it on the market right now.
Culturally, how long do you think it will take, and what will it take, for people to genuinely feel comfortable with your main pair of glasses that you're wearing every day having a camera on it, having a microphone on it? You're going to walk into the bathroom, maybe with other people. When do you think people in society go, 'This is cool, we're totally okay with this'? Or do you think that in the same way we're having commencement addresses about AI and people are booing, that's going to happen on the other end?
Yeah. So we've designed these products with privacy first in mind, and we feel really, really grateful to be aligned with our partners at Google and Samsung. The cameras will be off by default. If they're ever recording, it'll be incredibly visible with LEDs that can't be turned off. And we recognize that any technology creates change in behavior, and there's anxiety around how AI is going to transform how we all live.
