Insta360 opened its first US flagship store in Times Square on September 19, and the timing is not a coincidence. The same week, the company announced it has shipped more than ten million cameras worldwide — a number that includes every Insta360 model from the original Nano through the X5 and the brand-new Luna series. PetaPixel covered the opening (PetaPixel disclosed they attended as part of a paid collaboration); the Insta360 newsroom posted the milestone the day before.
The store sits on a stretch of Times Square that already has Tissot, CBS News and Skechers signage fighting for attention, which is probably the point. Insta360 is not the kind of camera company that lives in a back-corner booth at a trade show anymore. Putting a retail space in one of the most photographed intersections on the planet is a deliberate signal to the US creator market that the brand plans to stay.
Why this matters: brick-and-mortar is expensive, and Insta360 has historically leaned on Amazon, B&H and creator-influencer funnels for its North American sales. The Tokyo flagship opened in August, and a Munich location is on the books. A US flagship closes the loop — co-founder and VP of Marketing Max Richter framed it as "building lasting roots" in the American creator ecosystem, not just selling into it.
The other half of the story is the product mix. Insta360 still owns the 360-degree camera category, but the company is pushing into gimbal and vlog cameras with the new Luna series — the dual-lens Luna Ultra and the Luna Pro, both co-engineered with Leica for the optics. The Luna Ultra launched in the US earlier this year at $769; the Luna Pro arrived globally last week, and the Times Square store is one of the first places US buyers can handle both in person.
That hands-on angle is not a small thing. A 360 camera is genuinely hard to evaluate on a spec sheet — the whole point is what the resulting reframed video looks like, and that only makes sense once you see someone shoot and reframe with it. Insta360 is betting that getting bodies into a Times Square store, in front of tourists and creators who already own GoPros and DJI Osmos, will close more sales than another round of YouTube pre-roll.
The 10-million-camera milestone also puts some context around the numbers. GoPro is the well-known reference point for 360-and-action cameras at that kind of unit threshold, and Insta360 got there by selling into a creator and travel-vlog niche that GoPro largely ceded off when it pivoted to lifestyle and ruggedness. Insta360 has also been quietly shipping into OM System's Micro Four Thirds System for the past month, after GoPro officially joined the MFT standard group earlier in September.
If you are in New York, the store is open now in Times Square with the usual hands-on product testing, community events, and the kind of in-store demo routine that helps 360 cameras finally click for first-time buyers. If you are not, this is the kind of retail move that does not change much on the spec sheets but does signal where Insta360 wants to be in three years — no longer "the 360 camera company," but a broader action and creator-tool brand that happens to also do 360.