Another day, another seemingly random location drop for Snapbot, your friendly neighborhood Snapchat Spectacles vending machine. Today’s lucky destination is Santa Monica, bucking the recent trend of out-of-the-way spots for one just up the coast a bit from its original Venice Beach location in LA.
Snap, Inc. began selling Spectacles without much in the way of warning last Friday, dropping Snapbot on Venice Beach near Snapchat’s founding HQ. The first location proved the splashiest, located as it was in urban LA, prompting long lines and multiple refills of the Snapbot and leading to Spectacles’ single largest sales day (subsequent Snapbot pop-ups did not include repeated fill-ups of inventory, definitely leading to smaller sales totals overall).
Subsequent spots included a bakery near Big Sur in California, and a giant roadside whale outside Tulsa, OK, on old Route 66. Snap’s keeping its sales locations as quirky as the Spectacles themselves, in a magical mystery tour of the U.S. that’s leading to some scenic road trips for some dedicated scenesters. Today’s spot is also conveniently located next to the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium and Pacific Park, so it’s also ripe for photo ops.
So what’s it like to actually use Spectacles? Tito can fill you in — but he likes them, and so does everyone I talk to who has tried them.