Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. It’s Terrific Lady Day here in Paris and I’m celebrating with one of the greats, Amanda Dobbins. In my absence, Malique “Malique@puck.news” Morris is running the show. He’s sharing his recent conversation with Neil Blumenthal, the co-C.E.O. of Warby Parker, who makes an argument for the viability of smartglasses. (I still think we’re heading toward chips being implanted, but perhaps there’s a Her-style in-between moment.)

Up top, Malique has an Everlane update and shares why Zara’s Bad Bunny collaboration is so brilliant—further evidence that the Spanish apparel maker has elevated itself out of the fast fashion conversation. Plus, the one and only Rachel “Rachel@puck.news” Strugatz is here with intel on how Marc Jacobs Beauty is doing post-launch, and what the end of the Estée Lauder–Puig talks mean for the industry.

And just a reminder: I’m running a mailbag issue on Monday and I’d love to include a question from you. Grill me by replying to this email!

Also mentioned in this issue: Charlotte Tilbury, Selena Gomez, Ray-Bans, Allbirds, Marc Jacobs, Dave Gilboa, Meta, Tom Cruise, Vince Adams, Sephora, Aaron Levine, Stéphane de La Faverie, Charles Barr, Priya Venkatesh, Hung Vanngo, Jack Kerouac, and more…

Four Things You Should Know…

Rachel Strugatz

R.I.P. Puig x Estée Lauder: Well, that’s disappointing. After months of negotiations between Puig and The Estée Lauder Companies—talks that many insiders discussed less as an “if” than a “when”—the deal has officially fallen apart. According to the Spanish publication Expansión, the sticking point was Charlotte Tilbury, who was in the middle of renegotiating her contract with Puig, which owns 78.5 percent of her namesake makeup brand. At first I was surprised that a single founder and brand could derail a transaction of this scale. But one insider explained that the merger would have triggered a change-in-control clause in Tilbury’s contract, and the payout attached to it was enormous. Based on the brand’s recent $4.6 billion valuation, Tilbury would have been entitled to close to $1 billion had she exercised the sale option.

According to a senior industry source, Tilbury’s payout—and, presumably, her departure from the brand—was the “last straw” for Lauder. I suspect other issues were also at play, given that Charlotte Tilbury represents only one piece of Puig’s overall business. “I wonder how much [Lauder C.E.O.] Stéphane [de La Faverie] really wanted it to happen versus the Lauder family pushing?” another high-level industry source speculated. “He now gets to keep his job and focus on the turnaround.” Plus, there remains the possibility that Unilever, flush with cash after selling its food business to McCormick, will decide to pursue Lauder.
Marc Jacobs is the anti-“clean girl”: Wednesday marked the official reveal of the new Marc Jacobs Beauty, which meant that virtually every trade outlet published the same photos and near-identical story about the return. There was a minor discrepancy in messaging: In WWD, the Marc Jacobs team at Coty insisted this is “absolutely not a relaunch,” while Sephora’s global chief merchandising officer, Priya Venkatesh, referred to it as exactly that—which, of course, it is. But overall, the reception has been good.

One beauty executive described Marc Jacobs Beauty 2.0 as reflecting “the desire of the collective people to move away from the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic,” and I think that’s right. I can’t think of another makeup brand that has embraced color this way in recent years, aside from Hung Vanngo Beauty, the line from Selena Gomez’s makeup artist, which failed to make the splash that Sephora had hoped for when it debuted, last summer.

I could do without shade names like “Clapback,” “Hater,” and “Cancelled,” but the teens and twentysomethings that Marc Jacobs Beauty targets will probably welcome products that look different than everything else on Sephora’s shelves. In a sea of compacts, jars, and tubes in muted colors, the star-shaped mylar-balloon eyeshadows feel fun. I’d want it all if I were 20 years younger.

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Malique Morris

Bad Bunny x Zara captures Gen Z guys: Brand collabs with celebrities usually feel like desperate, miscalculated cash grabs, and the product is rarely compelling. That’s why Bad Bunny’s partnership with Zara caught my attention. The collection—which includes a cropped wool blazer, flared jeans, and satin shorts—perfectly encapsulates Bad Bunny’s persona: cheeky, conventionally appealing, and rooted in heritage. It also reflects the way many young men want to dress today.

The sold-out pieces—the woven and leather shopping bags; the high-collared, patchwork zip-up jacket; the cropped cotton polo shirt; and the henley—blend menswear’s enduring deference to preppiness with just enough edge to play with traditional ideas of masculinity. Lately, Zara’s collaboration strategy has been about translating a tastemaker’s aura into legible products that people want to wear. The retailer’s recent collections with Aaron Levine—who dresses the way many young men aspire to these days—have executed that formula especially well. These collabs remind people that Zara makes good clothes. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the strategy serves another purpose—namely, to distance Zara from the exhausting, and often performative, discourse that treats all fast fashion as inherently evil.
Everlane’s landlord strife: The day after I reported that Everlane had failed to notify the landlords of its San Francisco headquarters of its sale to Shein, I obtained an email exchange between company C.F.O. Vince Adams and property owner Charles Barr. The dispute centered on the estimated $124,932.36 in rent that Everlane owes Barr, a figure that includes late fees, legal fees, and lending costs.

In a May 19 email, Adams wrote to Barr, “I do expect to be able to settle any outstanding rent payments next week,” before adding that “our prior calculations already assumed full rent, late fees, and $10K of legal fees, but let me know if you disagree with any of those assumptions. We did not include any lender fees as that is not something that we had any visibility into, and it was not part of our prior lease structure or agreements.” Barr replied bluntly, “I’m not taking a loss because of Everlane’s failure to meet its obligations. … Soon we are going to have to add June into the equation.”

As I reported Wednesday, Everlane has already vacated its San Francisco offices and begun moving into its new Los Angeles headquarters. Adams’s assurance that rent payment could arrive next week suggests the Shein transaction is nearing completion and confirms that headquarters rent will likely be folded into the company’s debt clearance. The remaining question is how much Everlane is willing to pay. I submit that this saga still has a few chapters left. (Everlane declined to comment.)

And now, the main event…

Warby Parker’s $150 Million Google Goggles

Neil Blumenthal, co-founder and co-C.E.O. of the Millennial-beloved eyewear brand, discusses its big, Google-backed bet on A.I.-powered smartglasses—and how he plans to get people to wear them.

Malique Morris

Smartglasses are still not really a thing. Not even Ray-Ban has managed to make its partnership with Meta culturally ubiquitous. Last year, however, D.T.C. prescription eyewear player Warby Parker secured a $75 million investment from Google to develop its own version—one that, ideally, would succeed where its larger competitor had struggled. On Tuesday, Warby teased its first prototype: a classic rounded frame made from ultra-light nylon that can schedule appointments and play Spotify. The style, powered by Google’s A.I. technology, will be part of a broader eyewear launch this fall.

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There’s no denying that Warby Parker partly pursued this linkup because Google was willing to write the check. But at a moment when much of Warby Parker’s venture-backed, Millennial-fave cohort has unraveled—Everlane selling to Shein, Allbirds mutating into A.I. marketing slop—it matters that the defining 2010s eyewear brand is not only still standing but attracting eight-figure backing from a tech giant to try to make smartglasses feel less embarrassing to wear. It’s also the culmination of more than a decade of talks. “We signed an N.D.A. in 2012,” Warby Parker co-founder and co-C.E.O. Neil Blumenthal told me in one of his first interviews about the launch. Google has also committed an additional $75 million in future investment.

In our conversation, Blumenthal explained why Warby Parker’s “intelligent eyewear” differed from the “glasses meets headphones meets camera” approach embraced by Ray-Ban and Meta, nailing certain details, and how the company plans to convince consumers to care. For many industry observers, user adoption remains the biggest question hanging over the category—a fact that Blumenthal somewhat acknowledged. “Most people don't want to be a cyborg,” he told me. As usual, our interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The Intelligent-Eyewear Race

Malique Morris: What was the common perception of smartglasses when you all started Warby Parker, in 2010?

Neil Blumenthal: “Smartglasses” was certainly not a phrase in the common lexicon. Probably the most relevant cultural reference would be the glasses that Tom Cruise wore in Minority Report—which, my guess is, a lot of our customers today have not seen. It was several years later that Google would sort of prototype some smartglasses, and Bose would eventually launch glasses that had speakers in them, sort of like headphone glasses. I’ve argued that the world’s first truly intelligent eyewear hasn’t been launched yet.

When did you and co-founder and co-C.E.O. Dave Gilboa start thinking about designing smartglasses?

It was always something that we were excited about, but I’d say, with the advancement in these large language models and the daily utility that they now provide to people, it became abundantly clear that we should do something in this space.

They can be incredibly useful. I consider myself a pretty sophisticated diner. However, there are many times I’m at a restaurant and there’s something on the menu I’m unfamiliar with. Being able to point to a word or a sentence and say, “Hey, what is this?” and have it answer me in a second, without stopping the discussion at the table, or having to ask the waiter for a five-minute explanation, is something that I’ve been looking forward to. Satisfying somebody’s curiosity, where you can look at something and ask a question, is quite powerful and exciting.

Have you or Dave ever purchased or worn a pair of smartglasses before you set out to make your own?

We’ve tested a bunch of other products on the market. What we generally found is, there are some products that I would argue are great from a speaker-and-camera perspective, so it’s glasses meets headphones meets a camera, and there is certainly utility in that. But I wouldn’t describe those as intelligent eyewear because they’re not satisfying someone’s curiosity; they’re not answering questions that you may have.

With all of this in mind, how did you think about design? A lot of this is going to come down to how it looks.

We know first and foremost eyewear is a fashion accessory. These objects need to be beautiful, they need to look good, they need to represent who you are as a person. Most people don’t want to be a cyborg. There are also areas of optical expertise that we have that are important when it comes to fit and comfort and weight. There is a lot of technology in these glasses, and it’s hard to miniaturize them, make them super-functional, and ensure that they don’t weigh too much. That was an engineering and design challenge.

The weight aspect is really interesting. How did you address that to make the style feel like just another pair of glasses?

One of the biggest technical challenges is battery life, and you solve that by either having a larger battery that weighs more or by increasing the efficiency of the unit. Perhaps you do some of the computation on your mobile device or in the cloud. This is where partnering with somebody like Google, and also Samsung, really helps us optimize from a weight, power use, and utility standpoint.

The Origin Story

What’s the origin story of the Google partnership?

We’ve known the team at Google and the founders for well over a decade. This was something that we were doing, and we were talking to a lot of different folks, and I would assume that they were also talking to a bunch of different folks. But we’ve had this long-standing dialogue that made sort of perfect sense for us to develop a very deep and collaborative partnership.

Smartglasses need to feel cool to become ubiquitous. What is Warby Parker’s marketing strategy for a product that is decidedly uncool for most people?

In our minds, it’s really about how these help you live your life with confidence. There is a literary heritage to Warby Parker. The name comes from two early Jack Kerouac characters that we discovered in the New York Public Library. Glasses are the original wearable, and they’re associated with reading and writing and both the creation and consumption of knowledge. So we feel like we’re in this unique position to launch intelligent eyewear that does exactly those two things. Helps you actually consume more knowledge, and it can also help you create it as well.

In the most recent earnings, you said the forthcoming smartglasses launch is not factored into this year’s projected revenue growth. How big of a business can this be within the Warby Parker ecosystem?

Yes, with any new product you never know until you launch. Certainly Ray-Ban Meta has had a lot of success here, and those glasses are really focused from a camera-and-headphones perspective. So we think that this is a big opportunity. In terms of timing on when that starts to really impact our financials, that’s something that we’ll be able to speak more to later, certainly post-launch.

On the Ray-Ban Meta point, how are you thinking of them as competition? How is that factoring into the marketing strategy and how you communicate differentiation to consumers?

We’re really focused on intelligent eyewear for all-day, everyday wear and coming at it from sort of optical expertise. Frankly, this is a new market, and the more folks that are working to create it and expand it benefits everybody. Certainly when creating an entire new category, the more folks that are raising awareness about it, the better.

No feedback this week. Have a great long weekend,

Lauren

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Puck fashion correspondent Lauren Sherman and a rotating cast of industry insiders take you deep behind the scenes of this multitrillion-dollar biz, from creative director switcheroos to M&A drama, D.T.C. downfalls, and magazine mishaps. Fashion People is an extension of Line Sheet, Lauren’s private email for Puck, where she tracks what’s happening beyond the press releases in fashion, beauty, and media. New episodes publish every Tuesday and Friday.

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