Meta has signed a 10-year lease for a five-story building at 697 Fifth Avenue, marking the company’s first flagship retail location in New York City.
Meta has signed a 10-year lease for a five-story building at 697 Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, the company announced, marking its first flagship retail location in New York City and its second Meta Lab experiential store in the United States.
The space, a 15,000-square-foot townhouse adjacent to the St. Regis Hotel, was leased from real estate firm Vornado Realty Trust. It will serve as a hands-on environment where visitors can test the company’s latest hardware — including its Ray-Ban smart glasses and virtual reality headsets — in a setting the company describes as co-created with local artists to reflect the culture of its neighborhood.
The New York store follows Meta Lab in Los Angeles, which opened last year, and recent pop-up activations in Las Vegas and Honolulu. The company said it plans to open between eight and ten additional locations in the coming year, suggesting that physical retail has moved from experiment to strategy for a company that built its identity entirely online.
The push into experiential retail coincides with Meta’s growing focus on wearable technology. The company is planning to release a new smartwatch this year and has been expanding the capabilities of its Ray-Ban smart glasses, which have become one of the more commercially successful early consumer AI hardware products. A flagship store on one of the world’s most expensive and heavily trafficked shopping corridors gives Meta a prominent platform to put those products directly in consumers’ hands.
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Meta already has a significant physical presence in New York — its existing headquarters occupies 730,000 square feet at the Farley Building in the Penn District. The Fifth Avenue flagship is a different kind of footprint: not operational infrastructure, but a public statement about where the company believes consumer technology is headed.
