Meta’s AI glasses are already among the fastest sellers at America’s Best, Eyeglass World

AI Strategies // July 9, 2026 Meta’s AI glasses are already among the fastest sellers at America’s Best, Eyeglass World By Mitchell Parton Meta AI-powered glasses are beginning to make an impact on one of the largest vision retailers in the country.

The Ray-Ban Meta frames produced by EssilorLuxottica are among the fastest to sell out of any pair of frames at National Vision, the parent company of America’s Best and Eyeglass World, according to its CEO, Alex Wilkes. The retailer has about 1,270 retail locations in 40 states, the majority of which are under the America’s Best banner.

It sees close to 7 million optometry patients annually and employs 2,000 optometrists. This signals a shift in the vision landscape where cameras are making their way into the optical store, even for less technologically savvy users. National Vision first piloted Ray-Ban Meta glasses last year and quickly scaled it to more than 100 stores.

The retailer allows customers to apply their insurance benefit and buy prescription lenses. Generally, AI glasses can capture photos and videos using the camera and provide interaction with an AI assistant through built-in speakers and Bluetooth connectivity.

Essilor Luxottica and Meta first launched smart glasses together in 2021 and launched a second generation in 2023 that added louder speakers and an upgraded camera. Consumers buying Meta glasses aren’t necessarily AI power users.

Wilkes said he was recently in a store where an associate sold a pair of AI glasses to a consumer who wanted the glasses to record his remote-controlled cars from the sidelines. He said others may want to use them to translate restaurant menus or identify flowers.

“There are some who are buying it just for the novelty of being able to have a kind of quick snapshot recording of whatever is in their life at any given moment,” Wilkes said.

“As the world becomes more accustomed to and expects instant answers to their curiosities on all sorts of matters, I think that’s what’s going to continue to drive accelerated proliferation of this product.” Wearers of smart glasses are also a valuable new consumer base for National Vision.

Wilkes said consumers who buy those frames also buy the most premium lenses, such as Transitions lenses. “The consumer that is adopting the product is really maximizing their insurance benefit and choosing the most premium lens options available to them,” he said.

That is just one perspective on the rapid growth of smart glasses, which are fueling growth not just at optical retailers, but also within the overall consumer electronics space.

Over the 12 months ending this May, revenue in the smart glasses category has grown 233% to $436 million, according to Ben Arnold, executive director and consumer technology industry analyst at Circana. EssilorLuxottica said earlier this year that it sold over 7 million AI glasses in 2025, CNBC reported.

The category so far has been dominated by Meta, which has both Ray-Ban and Oakley models as well as new Meta Ray-Ban display glasses, which launched in September and add a small full-color display on the right lens that can show images and text.

Samsung and Snap also just announced new glasses, and Arnold said he expects other tech companies like Apple or Amazon to follow suit. Best Buy, meanwhile, has opened experiential spaces in more than 50 stores nationwide where customers can try out Meta’s AI glasses and VR headsets.

AI glasses are “a significant growth trend for us,” Best Buy’s incoming CEO, Jason Bonfig, said on an earnings call in March. “Our relationship with Meta is phenomenal — the way they show up in our stores and the way we’ve been able to bring their new products to market.”

“The idea of AI for the consumer is kind of a long-tail space where we will have a unique advantage,” Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said on the same call.

She mentioned Copilot+, a category of PCs from Microsoft that launched in 2024 — they feature a dedicated neural processing unit chip that powers AI features like automatically framing video calls and refining writing in documents. “Some of that we’ve already been leaning into, which is about enhancing existing technology.”

Brad Jashinsky, a director analyst at Gartner who covers retail, said that as smartphone sales have slowed, smart glasses could be the next big product category to help drive the consumer electronics sector.

“For a lot of retailers, especially Best Buy, … there’s a lot of excitement around smart glasses as being that sort of next category to bring people into the stores and help reignite the consumer electronics sector, which for a while has been sort of looking for that next innovation to get sales going again,” Jashinsky said.