In trying to stay away from retail hours & all the commitment, we have an arrangement with a big furniture store/design center & we have a simple 7.1 basic surround system w/pj & 106" fixed screen & cheap inwalls, in a TV/waiting room for the kids or dads to park while mom shops. It is tastefully furnished & kept up by them. My total commitment is to keep it functional & the initial cost of the system & install. No monthly rent, no staff, nothin'! If I feel like it, I attend some of their invitation only after hours sales events & meet & greet. We have a simple sign stating that if someone would like this experience or a similar experience in their home, take a card & call for appt. It paid for itself in just a few months completely. I am all over low overhead these days. Erik

Low overhead is nice, but most people aren't going to drop $6k on a DVD player they haven't seen, or $12k on speakers they haven't heard. Not in my neck of the woods anyway.

We are showing a $40k two channel system using B&W 802Ds, Chord amp and preamp, Exposure CD player, Furman power conditioning, and MIT Oracle cabling. People are blown away. They can't go anywhere around here and hear anything as good (of course that's my opinion).

On the down side, we've been open a year and we're still paying off the last of our initial inventory.

We are building a new building on 3 acres of land, we will have 3 Major theatres in it, a lounge for the plasma and LCDs, a boardroom, and a games area. The rest of the building is warehouse, burn in area, and workshop. We wil also have a indoor crapper! and we will also have showers, whew, I stink. The overal size is just a smidgen under 7000sq.ft. I think 2700 of it is warehouse.

"On the down side, we've been open a year and we're still paying off the last of our initial inventory."

Been there done that. My hats off to you though. Sounds like biz is good.

Yeti, it sounds incredible & I am impressed & I'm sure it is going to be one of a kind operation. I am not slamming anybody whatsoever. You have my utmost respect. My perspective is that I do not have to do inventory every month, sweat over payables, payroll, receivables, taxes galore, personnel mngmt, etc. Again this is my perspective & I applaud anyone who can think it, dream it & make it happen at any level one chooses & can be happy! Ain't America great?! Erik

we have a mocked up house inside our showroom complete with living area, kitchen, patio, game room, bedroom/bathroom and dedicated home theater. the house is complete with shingles and everything to make it look real

We have the same experience because we use our home as our showroom :-)

It's been working very well for us for the past four years for a number of reasons. We don't want retail hours, we want to keep the biz small for now, we have a very low overhead, and we have fun with all the electronics at home. As soon as our Control4 order is completed we'll have that to show as well. Our warehouse is off-site.

Dawn

My trunk overflows with demo gear......lol


Actually use my personal home to demo multi-room, multi-zone A/V, Security, Lighting Control and Central Vacuum.

61" RPTV in Family Room, 50" PDP in MBR, 32" LCD Panel in the Mstr Bath, 30" LCD Panel in the Kit. All with access to the DVD file, and the DirecTV HD Tivo.

Warehouse ( I know you guys thought I didn't have one, since it wouldn't fit in the trunk....lol) has an Infocus, and SharpVision projo with a 92" Vutec screen.

For those who might want the "Theater" room, I think you must have a demo to show off your talents.

Seating, lighting, programmed remote and some really good speakers, connected to some better than average equipment is a must.

Tweak that room. It's your best chance to sell something above average.....

Additionally, I usually have a couple of demo rooms going in spec houses around town.

It was quite an investment. I was able to work out deals with many manufacturers above and beyond their normal showroom discount for demo equipment. This really helped me get more accomplished and stay within budget. We are keeping retail hours until the showroom becomes more established then I see us going to by appointment only. 10-7 m-f and 10-5 on Sat.

The biggest upsell opportunity I have noticed is in cabling. Using a Stereo Receiver and CD player, we wired 3 pair of speakers with generic 14 gauge speaker wire and AudioQuest Type 4 wire. One wire is screwed down and the other with banana plug. Using a speaker selector box to choose which pair of speaker and which wire is being used we are able to demo the sound quality difference. This has resulted in a large increase in our premium speaker wire sales.

I was a retailer in a previous life and those skills are really coming in hand with the showroom. If anyone needs any advice from a retail aspect please feel free to email me and I will help anyway I can.

Jim

JimDon,
I'll take you up on your offer...Particularly interested in details of your spk wire demo.....also any setup for interconnects?
tjg

Using a Denon DRA-395 Stereo Receiver, DCM-380 CD-Changer, and Speakercraft 12 and 6 pair speaker selector boxes we are powering a wall of speakers with 15 pair of speakers. AudioQuest Type 4 wire from the Receiver to speaker selector boxes. The original intent was to use this area of the showroom to finalize speaker choices for D/A and to demo the differences in speakers. We felt it was important for the client to see that we are using the same source devices, not tricking anything up to make the more expensive speakers sound better. With 15 pair of speakers and 18 available on the speaker selector boxes I decided to try a wire demo to see if it could help increase premium wire sales.

Our AudioQuest rep had come in previously and did a demo where he had different speaker wire on banana plugs and kept plugging in, unplugging, etc. I decided to try and duplicate his demo but didn't want to do the plug in, unplug bit. I took the empty channels on the speaker selector box and ran the AudioQuest wire to the screw down terminals of 3 pair of tower speakers and ran a generic 14 gauge wire to the same speakers connected with banana plugs. In the sales process talk about the difference quality cables makes. Then to demo this we use a jazz cd with a full range of sound and a dave matthews cd. By selecting speaker 1 on the speaker selector box I am activating a pair of Def Tech BP7006 with the generic speaker wire. Start the track on the cd over again so the client is listening to the exact same music and choose speaker 2 on the speaker selector box. This activates the same Def Tech BP7006's but using the AudioQuest wire. The difference in quality, especially at the low end is amazing. This is done with 3 different pair of speakers at vastly different price points. By having these different price point speakers the wire demo is given more credibility since the difference is noticed across the board.

I do not have an interconnect A/B comparison setup, but have found that by demonstrating the speaker wire difference I have built up credibility across the board and can upsell any interconnects fairly easily. When the 21 year old girl I have working part-time can talk about quality wire and demo the differences it really speaks volumes to the professionalism of the company as a whole.