Remember fidget spinners? In May of this year, it was impossible for any child under the age of 12 to have too many of them in every shape, size, and color available. They started at around $2.99 at your local 7–11 and somehow found their way up to $8.99 and that’s for the crappy plastic ones with the K-Mart brand skateboard bearings in them. Then to make them cheaper to produce, they started pulling out the three bearings on the edges, replacing them with round metal pieces, and just leaving the one in the center. These things were getting play on YouTube, being made out of Carbonite, Adamantium, and whatever Jesus’s sandals are made from. Until September and now they’re hidden away in a box with the dab. That’s 4 months of glory for a trend that had taken a younger generation by storm more so than the Slinky or Yo Yo. You can find them now just hanging out next the the registers at convenient stores for $1.00 and there’s warehouses packed full of them just waiting to be melted into whatever fad comes next. Just like Snapchat Spectacles. This isn't the first time we’ve seen the “VIP Exclusive” delivery method backfire and it won’t be the last. Snap and their exclusive Spectacle drop sites that had SnapFans lining up to be trend setters and bug eyed douchebags seemed like a success. Every single tech site had massive write-ups on how THIS would be what transcends us into wearables and everyone involved in this campaign is a genius! Until people used them once and said, “Well, these things blow.” Evan Spiegel at the very beginning had said they were “a toy” and that now seems like some foresight into the dumpster fire of marketing that ensued. It took over five months for Spectacles to be available to the average scummy person that didn’t happen to be cool enough to get their hands on them early, and no actual celebrity wore them more than once. On top of that, there was never any content produced that happened to be considered remotely interesting or “good”. So with Facebook ripping off every single thing Snapchat does and jamming into Instagram, why didn't we see a Spectacles knock off? The larger user base was there and they have the ability to mass produce the finished product but Facebook has been focusing more on the amount of users than the hardware associated with the product itself. Facebook has been pumping out their “Free Basics” program, while not being completely accepted in some places, literally lets anyone in over 50 countries with a mobile browser create content for Instagram. Which looks a lot better than twenty eight people wearing stupid glasses. Snapchat is still the absolute go to with Gen Z for messaging and daily usage, but how long will that last when Snap cares more about what they think the users want them to be instead of growing from what the user base has actually made them?
