Pioneer In Product Expansion With Sub-$100 Headphone Line

Pioneer is bringing a line of sub-$100 consumer headphones to the U.S. market as part of a larger plan to broaden its product portfolio in the wake of exiting the flat-panel TV business last year, Russ Johnston, executive vice president of Pioneer’s home entertainment department told Consumer Electronics Daily. “Our goal has been to spend more time filling out the rest of our product portfolio,” Johnston said. “When we had panels, it was a large project that took a lot of time to manage, sell and market, and we didn’t spend enough time on the rest of our portfolio.”

Johnston said Pioneer has already stepped up its receiver business, and adding consumer headphones to the product mix is the first step in an overall expansion of the line. “You'll see other categories develop as we work with our retail base to determine the best fit for our brand and their needs,” Johnston said. “We have a strong grasp of the home theater marketplace and our distribution is fairly tight so we need to be sure we're catering to the needs of the dealers we do sell to."

The company hopes to leverage awareness from its professional headphone business, which supplied the professional market for more than 15 years. The company has been selling consumer headphones in Japan and other markets, and as many as 50-60 consumer headphone models are available at any given time in the worldwide market, Johnston said. “We've never marketed, developed strategies or brought the proper mix to the retail market in America, and that’s what we've just done,” he said. Production of some of the headphones is being subcontracted out, Johnston said, and others are being manufactured at Pioneer’s Tohoku loudspeaker factory in Japan.

The Pioneer headphones will be available via Amazon and djinspired.pioneerelectronics.com. Both sites will begin taking pre-orders Friday. The company will add brick-and-mortar dealers via its distribution network this fall, Johnston said. “The independent mom-and-pop retailers are definitely going to have this product,” Johnston told us, “but there isn’t an exclusive play in the category.” Most of the models have been available over the past six months to a year in other markets, but the company re-packaged the product for the U.S. to meet requirements for label warnings and UPCs. Having re-merchandised the product with DJ-inspired styling and names including “Steel Wheels” and “Loop,” Pioneer is now ready for the North American market, Johnston said, noting the current popularity of DJ and club culture here. Going forward, higher end models are on the company’s radar to meet both “the passionate iPhone/iPod lifestyle” and the “executive traveler” noise-cancellation market, Johnson said, noting that the noise-cancellation market has several patent-protected areas that have to be considered. The seven new models, incorporating on-ear and ear bud designs, will list from $19.99 to $89.99, and more advanced models are expected to roll out over the next 12-18 months.