Polk Won’t Expand Distribution Despite Shift to More Personalized Audio

A cultural shift to more personalized audio products is one of the drivers behind DEI Holdings’ Global Design Center that the company opened at its Vista, Calif., headquarters last week, Chief Design Officer Michael DiTullo told Consumer Electronics Daily. The design center’s primary focus is on personal audio products, according to DEI Holdings President Kevin Duffy. DEI’s product lineup will expand to include other portable audio products for the company’s portfolio, which also includes the Definitive Technology and Boom audio brands. Products on the roadmap that aren’t currently fielded by the company include Bluetooth speakers, Duffy told us.

It will be a tricky balancing act for the company to maintain the image of audio products with entrenched 30-year identities and loyal consumer bases while trying to do a design makeover, but Duffy said the brands’ history and image will remain intact. “Each brand has a wonderful history and beautiful stories behind them,” he said, saying the strategy for the design center isn’t to reinvent the brands but to reinforce them. DiTullo referred to bringing out the stories and “passion” of the individual brands, saying, “we never want to veneer those.” At the same time, he noted that personal audio products “are getting closer to the body,” comparing them to watches and eyeglasses in the way people use them as an expression of “dreams and aspirations” and their music.

A by-product of the fashion trend toward more personalized audio products is that more nontraditional retailers are carrying headphones and other audio products, DiTullo noted. “You're seeing apparel retailers selling audio because it’s becoming so personal,” he said, saying one of the purposes of the design center is to “pick up on larger cultural trends whether they're inside consumer electronics or outside so we can better understand how people are perceiving themselves and respond to that.”

Regarding whether DEI would expand distribution for the personal audio products born out of the design center, however, Duffy said the company is focusing on designing headphone lines that fit with “existing distribution.” Current dealers for each brand are “relevant to what each brand stands for, and I don’t currently view it as necessary for us to do something majorly different,” he said. “We're going to be designing headphones and things that fit the Polk image."

Duffy wouldn’t disclose the cost of the investment in the design center, which is currently being “rehabbed” out of existing empty space at the company’s 200,000-square-foot headquarters. The cost is “pretty material for the size of the company,” he said, and investment will expand and contract based on the amount of work being done and how many third-party resources the company is using at a given time, he said. The center will bring on five staff members initially, and they'll take a “multi-disciplinary approach,” DiTullo said, rather than having dedicated design teams within brands. “Designers working together are more powerful than when separating them out,” he said. The company will continue to use third-party design resources and all current engineering, design and marketing teams will remain intact, Duffy said, calling the design center a “completely additive investment."

Duffy and DiTullo wouldn’t comment on the vision of the design initiative, saying they'd comment on that in the future. DEI will release new product information at CES 2013, Duffy said. DiTullo’s creative resume includes stints at frog design, where he led projects for Google, Procter & Gamble and Motorola, and at Nike, where he was sport culture division designer.