Walmart’s $90 Bet on Smart Eyewear Turns Vision Centers Into Wearable Tech Destinations

Walmart has begun rolling out EyeFly smart audio glasses to more than 2,000 Vision Centers nationwide, confirmed by a Walmart spokesperson to Chain Store Age this week. The glasses, made by House of Modo, retail at $90 — a price Walmart says is below most comparable smart audio eyewear, which typically sells for $200 or more. Walmart is the first national retailer to carry the brand, including exclusive styles available only through its stores.

The specs are straightforward: Bluetooth audio built into the frame, open-ear speakers for music, calls, and navigation, touch controls on the temples, up to six hours of battery life, and prescription-ready lenses that can be fitted through Vision Center staff. House of Modo designed EyeFly without cameras or video recording, a deliberate choice the company’s founder and CEO Alessandro Lanaro described to WWD as a response to consumer skepticism about camera-equipped wearables.

The Pricing Breaks the Category’s Existing Logic

EyeFly launched at Mido in Milan in late January 2026 with a projected average U.S. retail price of roughly $200, per WWD’s reporting at the time. Walmart’s exclusive $90 price point represents a significant departure from that figure, and from what the broader smart audio eyewear market has established. Ray-Ban Meta glasses, the category’s current volume leader through EssilorLuxottica’s partnership with Meta, begin well above $200.

Getting to $90 for a prescription-ready frame with Bluetooth audio and swappable smart temples is not a line extension of existing eyewear pricing — it is a structural bet that the category’s adoption curve looks more like AirPods than it does like early smartwatches. HSBC analysts, cited by WWD in January, project smart eyewear will generate $200 billion globally by 2040. Walmart is placing its own version of that bet through the Vision Center floor rather than through its general merchandise aisles.

Optical Services Separate This From a Standard Consumer Tech Launch

EyeFly at Walmart is not just a product sitting on a shelf. The glasses are prescription-ready, meaning customers can have lenses fitted through Vision Center opticians — the same staff that already handles prescription eyewear consultations across Walmart’s more than 3,000 Vision Centers, which are backed by over 9,500 opticians and more than 200 associate optometrists, according to Walmart’s May 2025 corporate announcement. That service layer creates an experience a consumer electronics aisle cannot replicate.

This is the same logic Walmart applied when it brought EssilorLuxottica’s Nuance Audio Glasses to nearly 1,500 Vision Centers last spring, priced at $1,100 for an open-ear hearing solution targeting perceived mild to moderate hearing loss — a product eligible for vision insurance and HSA/FSA funds. EyeFly serves a different segment entirely: it is a consumer audio and connectivity device, not a hearing health solution. But both products follow the same channel architecture: a tech-forward product, fitted and supported by licensed optical staff, distributed through Walmart’s health infrastructure.

The Vision Center Is Becoming a Wearable Tech Channel

Walmart VP of Health and Wellness David Reitnauer said last May that the direction of retail vision was “seamlessly blending style, tech and affordability.” The EyeFly launch at $90, exclusive to Walmart, is the clearest expression of that strategy to date.

Over the past eighteen months, Walmart has expanded its Vision Center’s tech capabilities in sequence: virtual try-on launched with 750 styles in early 2024, grew toward 1,700 frames by mid-2025 per Chain Store Age, and now sits alongside both a $1,100 hearing-tech frame and a $90 consumer wearable in-store. The progression is deliberate. eMarketer forecast in December 2025 that 85.8 million U.S. consumers — roughly a quarter of the population — would use a health-related smart wearable in 2026. Walmart is positioning the Vision Center to capture a meaningful share of where that adoption happens.

Suppliers in Adjacent Categories Are Looking at a Different Kind of Channel

For suppliers and sellers whose categories border health, wellness, audio, and consumer electronics, the EyeFly launch is a signal worth reading carefully. Walmart has moved from stocking standard eyewear to anchoring a wearable tech platform inside an optician-staffed service environment, with exclusive brand relationships and a deliberate price architecture.

For 3P Marketplace sellers in consumer tech accessories, EyeFly’s Walmart exclusivity is a reminder that Walmart is using its store footprint to build exclusive product relationships that online-only competition cannot easily replicate. If Walmart is curating a wearable tech story around the Vision Center, the assortment around it — cases, charging accessories, compatible devices — will follow the same logic.

For 1P suppliers, the more direct question is whether any product in their portfolio can credibly live inside a service-backed optical environment. EyeFly did not get there by being the best smart glasses on the market; it got there by being the most accessible one, fitted by trained staff, at a price point that removed the barrier to a first purchase.

House of Modo told WWD that EyeFly’s audio-only positioning — no cameras, no visual capture — was specifically designed to expand the market beyond early adopters who have already accepted camera-equipped glasses. Whether the category finds durable volume at $90 or functions more as a category primer, Walmart has established the Vision Center as a serious participant in a wearable tech conversation that is still deciding what mainstream looks like.

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