Modern Retail: Meta Lab footprint set to nearly double

Meta is nearly doubling the store footprint of Meta Lab, the retail concept it built to sell Ray-Ban AI glasses, according to Modern Retail.

The baseline is small. When The Wall Street Journal's Meghan Bobrowsky and Isabella Simonetti reported on the New York pop-up in November 2025, they named Meta Lab locations in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Burlingame, California, and the newly opened New York store. Modern Retail now reports the footprint is set to nearly double.

A store built to slow people down

The design brief for these stores runs against most of what a store operations manager is usually measured on. The Journal reported that the pop-ups have coffee stations and full-length mirrors so visitors can photograph themselves in their Ray-Bans. Matt Jacobson, Meta's vice president and creative director for AI wearables, told the paper the company wants people to take pictures, come in with friends, and stay a while rather than move through quickly.

That is a deliberate choice, and a revealing one. A store whose success metric is photos taken and friends brought along is a marketing asset first and a point of sale second.

For a retail executive at any brand launching a wearable, the relevance is conditional but direct. If the product's main objection is how it looks on the buyer, a mirror and a friend's opinion do work that a product page cannot. Meta's willingness to expand the physical network, per Modern Retail, suggests the company believes that try-on moment is worth the rent.

From a surprise hit to a rollout

The Journal traced the store push to 2024, when the Ray-Ban AI glasses became what it called a surprise hit and Meta began opening pop-ups. Jacobson helped set up stores in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Burlingame, Calif., and most recently New York City, according to the Journal. The New York location, which opened in mid-November 2025, mixed skateboard memorabilia with Meta x Ray-Ban product displays in its lobby, according to the Journal's photographs.

Modern Retail describes the growth as nearly doubling the footprint. The cities the Journal named are a starting point, not a stated total store count, and Modern Retail's own reporting is the place to look for the size of the expansion.

The design choice matters for anyone competing for consumer electronics shelf space or mall foot traffic. A store built for lingering and photo-sharing does its best work in stretches when it has the most shoppers on hand to linger.

What the next locations will show

The open question is format. The stores the Journal reported on were pop-ups, which is a low-commitment way to test whether an experience-first store actually moves product. A doubling of the footprint raises the stakes on that test, and the leases Meta signs for the new locations will say more about its confidence than any announcement.

For a director of retail at a competing eyewear or wearables brand, the sharper question is now concrete: whether a coffee station and a mirror, staffed and rented in a major city, produces enough trial to justify the cost, and whether Meta keeps that design as the network grows. The next Meta Lab opening will be the first evidence.