Meta is in the lifestyle business now.
Meta Lab, NYC. Image: Meta.
The world's biggest social media company wants to be a lifestyle brand. Fifth Avenue is where that bet gets serious.
Meta has signed a 10-year lease with Vornado Realty Trust for a five-level, 15,000-square-foot townhouse at 697 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, adjacent to the St. Regis Hotel. The space, branded Meta Lab, is the company's first flagship retail location in New York, following the opening of a Los Angeles flagship in 2025.
Meta Lab is designed as an experiential retail space where visitors can try AI-powered glasses and Meta Quest VR headsets—the kind of hardware that's easier to want once you've actually worn it. Each location is shaped by its neighbourhood, built with local artists and communities around a distinct creative theme. In New York, that theme is skate culture: a Zoo York archive tracing NYC skate history from the 1960s to today, a mural from pro skater Zered Bassett's Paper Skaters series, gear from woman-founded Rookie Skateboards, and a coffee bar from Buddies Coffee Roasters, co-founded by former pro skater Taylor Nawrocki.
Image: Meta
"Placing our flagship store alongside the brands that help define culture will distinguish Meta Lab from traditional consumer electronics retail," said Matt Jacobson, Meta's VP and Creative Director of Wearables.
That's the explicit ambition, and it's a significant one. Meta isn't positioning itself next to Best Buy. It's positioning itself next to Tiffany, Nike and the luxury houses that have anchored Fifth Avenue for decades. The skate culture angle is the bridge: a language of authenticity and community that luxury borrows from streetwear, and that Meta is now borrowing from both.
The skeptics have a point. Bob Phibbs, CEO of retail consulting firm The Retail Doctor, was blunt: "Sunglass Hut is selling more Ray-Ban Metas before noon on a Tuesday than this store will sell all week. Meta knows that. This location is a press release with a lease."
He's probably right about the sales figures. But the flagship store stopped being about retail volume a long time ago. Apple understood this first—its stores became support hubs, cultural landmarks, permission structures. Meta is following the same logic: the best way to make people comfortable with technology that lives on their face is to let them try it somewhere that already feels like somewhere they want to be.
Image: Meta
There is, however, a harder question sitting behind the lifestyle ambition. In early March, Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten reported that Kenya-based contractors working for Meta were reviewing video content captured by the Ray-Ban smart glasses, including footage of people using the toilet and having sex. "We see everything—from living rooms to naked bodies," one worker told the papers. The UK's Information Commissioner's Office said the claims were "concerning" and wrote to Meta requesting information on how it was meeting its data protection obligations.
Meta said content shared with Meta AI is sometimes reviewed by contractors to improve the user experience, as disclosed in its privacy policy, and that data is filtered before review. It also clarified that unless users choose to share content, it stays on their device. But the gap between what the policy says and what users understand remains a live issue, and one that a skate archive and a coquito latte bar won't resolve.
The glasses are genuinely useful. The store is genuinely compelling. But the lifestyle brand argument only holds if people trust what the product is doing when it's on their face. That trust is still being built and in some quarters, actively contested.
Meta has been building its New York footprint quietly for nearly two decades, from its first office in 2007 to 730,000 square feet at the Farley Building in 2020. The Fifth Avenue flagship adds the missing piece: a street-level, public-facing argument for what Meta wants to be.
Whether New York buys it is another question entirely.
Meta Lab NYC is at 697 Fifth Avenue, open Monday–Saturday 10am–7pm and Sunday 11am–6pm.
