Boston Acoustics In ‘First-of-a-Kind’ Partnership With Bassett Furniture

Bassett Furniture is launching a line of entertainment cabinets custom-designed with a soundbar system from Boston Acoustics, the companies said Thursday at a New York briefing. The Nvelop line of credenzas, including two models in the Louis Philippe line and two Redin Park pieces, is priced from $1,499 to $1,999, the companies said.

The speaker products are a modified Boston Acoustics TVee Model 25 soundbar with wireless subwoofer, said Eli Harary, Boston Acoustics senior vice president of global brand management. The Model 25 retails in electronics stores for $349, but Harary said the products in the furniture models “are not out-of-the-box TVee Model 25s.” Bassett’s Louis Philippe Tall Media Cabinet, which the Nvelop was modeled on, sells for $1,899 on the company website. The Nvelop version with the electronics, an audio jack for an MP3 player, holes for wires and a reinforced cabinet, has a suggested retail price of $1,999.

Both credenza series, part of the company line for nine years, are two of Bassett’s “better sellers,” Martha Pfeiffer, vice president of merchandising, told us. The 22-inch depth shaves a few inches off older armoires the company designed to hold tube TVs, she said. Coming up with the right depth has been a trial-and-error process for Bassett. The company tries to get close to 18-19 inches, just clearing the depth of the deepest components that have to fit inside the cabinet as TVs became thinner. Where the tube used to dictate the depth of a cabinet, now components like DVRs and Blu-ray players determine the depth. “We tried a 15-inch-deep model but it was too shallow and didn’t sell well,” Pfeiffer said. The current dimensions were determined by factors including storage capacity and scale for a room, she said.

Bassett is augmenting the sales floor experience with a “green button” that consumers press to hear different clips of music, sports events and movies with the soundbar system turned on and then off, providing consumers with a do-it-yourself A-B switch between the soundbar and the TV’s internal speakers. The demo runs about four minutes, Harary said. At our demo, the companies were demonstrating the furniture with Vizio TVs, but the furniture doesn’t come with a TV option, Harary said.

Boston Acoustics hopes to reach a consumer it wouldn’t otherwise see, Harary said. There are customers who are looking for places to put TV sets who want to buy high-quality furniture, he said. “But what do they do to get reasonably good quality sound without having to run five speakers or figuring out how to hook it up?” he said. The companies have tried to simplify the process with a single connector between the TV and the electronics along with a built-in four-outlet surge protector/outlet strip.

Harary said the difference between the Nvelop furniture line and other electronics/cabinet pairings tried in the past is that others “led to nowhere” where wires went to openings for equipment but consumers were left to figure out the speaker options and connections themselves. The Nvelop line was engineered ground up for the sound, packing speakers into specified locations hidden behind a custom grill that can be lowered for access to the soundbar. The cabinet had to be raised off the floor to accommodate the 150-watt six-inch subwoofer that’s built into the back corner of the furniture and holes were punched out for access to the electronics. Sound ports out through a hole in the bottom of the cabinet and the cabinets’ back panels are reinforced with rubber gaskets to prevent vibration, Pete Morrison, director of retail marketing for Bassett, told us. There are also shelves for components and drawers for storage. The soundbar connects to the TV via an optical cable. The companies designed the integrated systems over 18 months, Harary said. Borrowing a cabinet design from other Bassett media cabinets, the doors open out 180 degrees and can close over the electronics for customers who want to hide them.

Distribution for Nvelop will be exclusive to Bassett and its network of about 100 stores, Morrison said. It will be offered to other Bassett partner retailers in markets like Chicago where Bassett doesn’t have company-owned stores, he said. The company plans to partner with Darvin Furniture in the Chicago area, he said. Bassett tested the credenzas in three stores, Harary said, and consumer response has been positive, with many consumers expressing surprise at the difference possible between the standard and enhanced sound, he said. Bassett will start running ads for the Nvelop line in The Wall Street Journal in the next couple of weeks and local retail advertising for the line will begin after Memorial Day, Morrison said.

"Most people will only see this as a beautiful piece of furniture with fabric in front,” Morrison said. The “hook” is hearing it, he said, and it will be a challenge to convey the message on the website. To support the website experience, Bassett will show a virtual button that simulates the green button experience in stores. Although the listening experience won’t accurately reflect the sound quality of the Boston system and will be limited by the user’s computer speakers, Bassett hopes the interactive feature will have enough appeal to draw customers into stores “to hear the real thing,” Morrison said.

The companies are viewing the relationship as a first step but haven’t committed to further developments. It’s the first time Boston has done a partnership like this, Harary said, and the companies will determine next steps based on how the program develops. “I'm interested in finding out if it does take off, where do we go then?” Morrison said. “I can see where people might come up with a new way of doing this from a furniture standpoint.” He envisioned a bedroom dresser with drawers for clothes. “It’s hard for us to gauge what rate of sale we expect out of it because it’s a totally new category,” he said.

Bassett is doing most training online, Morrison said, although there was some in-store training in North Carolina stores to gauge feedback from salespeople. Morrison said he had expected technical questions but “they knew they couldn’t go down that road with the customer,” he said. If there’s a problem with the electronics, consumers can call the Bassett customer service number, he said, and if the issue isn’t furniture-related, “we will warm-handshake the call” to Boston by calling that technical support line for further help, he said.

Regarding the difference in lifespan for the furniture line “which can be passed down from generation to generation,” and electronics, which can change with the next surround-sound decoder from Dolby, Morrison said: “If it gets to the point where the electronics are outmoded, I would hope this is generic enough for people to upgrade if they felt they needed to 15 years down the road.” For Boston’s part, Harary said it’s tough to predict what changes will happen in electronics, but “now that we have an optical input, that’s going to take care of the next several years of TV sets -- until the TV companies decide to go a different route again.”