Year After Nortek Control Buy, Nice Begins Brand Transition for Elan

CARLSBAD, Calif. -- Italy-based Nice, which bought Nortek Control a year ago for $285 million (see 2110050066), completed the transition Wednesday, announcing it retired the Nortek brand name and is now Nice North America. The company is integrating residential smart home brands including Elan, SpeakerCraft and Panamax under the Nice brand, a process it expects to complete by the end of 2023.

A company mission in the smart home space is to “simplify everyday movements,” Chief Marketing Officer Mark Burson told journalists this month on an embargoed two-day media trip to North American office headquarters. Nice wants to integrate what has been a disparate roster of Nortek brands into a linked ecosystem for residential, commercial and industrial applications and to ride global trends as "one unified organization."

Nice sees itself as a “breath of fresh air in the industry,” said Chief Product Officer Paul Williams, introducing the Italian brand to the U.S. smart home market. For the residential space, Nice wants to bring sophisticated, easy-to-use user interfaces to homeowners via the custom installation channel. “We’re simplifying,” Williams said: “You shouldn’t have to have 19 apps to run your house.”

A similar design language is part of Nice’s future strategy, Williams said. Looking at the collection of Nortek products, for those unfamiliar with Nortek it would be “hard to believe they all came from the same company,” Williams said. “There is no symmetry between them, no DNA” to indicate the products are related to each other, he said. “That’s one of the things we’re changing -- to make the visual design language consistent.” Product design doesn’t need to match exactly, he said, but “a beautiful visual design language” allows the consumer to be able to associate the look and “know exactly what that product is.”

That’s the goal for the North America market, Williams said, saying a design language already exists for the rest of the organization, which has a presence in 22 countries. Nice hit the market in 1993 with automated gates and doors and followed with sun shading systems seven years later. It entered the wireless alarm market in 2008, the commercial security market in 2016 and two years later began selling security and smart systems for homes. In 2021, it entered the global smart home control space.

Combining Nice and Nortek gives Nice North America breadth and depth of products and technology, from different smart home starting points, Williams said: “Wherever their entry point is to smart connected spaces comes from, we can meet them there and then bring them into a bigger solution.”

That includes garage doors at the mainstream level, Williams said, noting the company is the third-largest garage door maker in the U.S. with the Linear brand. “If you start with a smart garage door, and it’s one of our smart garage doors … by working with one of our dealers, you can add sun shading or control,” he said. Garage and security “go hand in hand,” he said.

AI will factor into future product plans, Williams said. “If I know you’re in a space and can open and close the blinds based on your being in that space -- or based on your body temperature whether you’re hot or cold -- there’s a lot of other AI we can build into these things" so he home interacts with the consumer "and adjusts to what they want it to be.” That reduces dependency on integrator programming, which can be a weakness in the custom integration channel: "The system is only as good as the dealer that put it in," he said.

Nice received initial dealer pushback when executives presented the brand transition plan from Elan to Nice for the company’s home control system, said Richard Pugnier, vice president-marketing and education. “There was a little bit of shock,” from dealers who said, “You can’t change the brand; it’s been around for 20 years, and we’ve invested so much into this,” he said.

Growing the Elan business in the crowded, mature home control space will be a challenge. As one dealer told us, a control system relationship “is like a marriage, and when you get married, it’s really hard to break up.” Integrators that have invested in being a Crestron, Control4 or Savant dealer, for instance, have trained their staff on installation, software and support, and they have made a commitment to clients to support the system long term.

Pugnier acknowledged the deep relationship between a home control system manufacturer and dealers, saying, “A marriage is a perfect way to describe it -- both must be invested for it to be a success.” Pugnier said Nice understands “it takes dedication and trust to support the dealer network and we believe this is something we do very well.”

Among its dealer support initiatives is Nice U., a palette of in-person, virtual and self-paced training and education courses, which Pugnier described as “incentivizing dealers through rewards, creating a community for support,” and delivering customized marketing assets and sales tools. The company plans to reach new dealers through profitability programs for individual dealers and buying groups, Pugnier said, calling the programs “the most lucrative partner programs in the industry," and its builder services program is designed to help dealers grow their business in the new construction and design channels. Nice is also banking on its “beautifully designed, intuitive” systems to be “easy-to-sell” systems for dealers.

When presented with the company’s dealer support initiatives, Elan dealers who were initially skeptical of the transition to the Nice brand “came around to it,” Pugnier maintained, saying they understood the transition will help them and their customers long term.

Nice christened its reimagined Carlsbad Experience Center during the press trip, transforming what had been a space divided by individual product lines for Nortek’s siloed brands -- which also include Fibaro, Furman, Gefen, 2Gig and Proficient -- into a space showing off the integrated solutions. Branding was minimal in the space to emphasis integrated systems vs. individual brands. The experience center -- outfitted with touch panels, security, lighting, audio and video and access control solutions demonstrated in lifestyle situations -- is open to dealers, members of the design community and consumers on an appointment-only basis.

Nice’s branding overhaul doesn’t stretch throughout the line of Nortek Control brands, said Burson, saying the company is delineating between the smart home and security lines, including 2Gig and the direct-to-consumer, do-it-yourself abode line. “We don’t want to encroach too deeply on the 2Gig space, or the security dealer space; we want to keep these separate and make sure that the existing security dealers don’t feel like we’re invading their area,” he said.

CEO Edoardo Malfe said the company understands the Nice brand is “at the beginning” in North America and it wants to spread the word about the brand, but “at the same time we want to be careful and get all the value from the brands that we acquired.” The company recognizes some of the brands have a long history and a legacy, he said.

Though Nice will keep the 2Gig and Linear brand names, it also plans to get the message out that the company’s various product areas work together in an ecosystem. “It’s going to take some time,” said Burson, but the goal is for people to see “the value we’re creating by having these things work together. We’re looking at ways to create solutions without creating complexity.” Brands that aren’t transitioned to the Nice name will be identified with the tagline “a Nice brand,” he said.

Proficient will retain its brand name, allowing the company to sell individual audio solutions vs. the combined approach the company is seeking by rebranding Elan, Panamax and SpeakerCraft, which are often sold in a package, Williams said. Video analytics brand IntelliVision “will take more of a back seat” as the facial recognition analytics technology inside the company’s product lines, such as Linear security cameras and Elan touch panels, said Burson. The company licenses IntelliVision technology to other companies, including competitors.

Nice operates 145 industrial plants in the U.S., Italy, Germany, Poland, Brazil, Australia, South Africa and Canada. North American manufacturing operations are in Grand Rapids, Michigan; Kent, Washington; and Dorval, Quebec. Distribution comes out of Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix and the hub in Olive Branch, Mississippi.