Rob Stott: All right, we are back on the Connected Design Podcast, and we’re going to just talk about it. I’m higher than you guys, but still…
Marc Fisher: You are way higher. And we’re in Las Vegas, so it’s not that kind of high either. No, it’s not. You are like a good two or three inches above where we are.
Rob Stott: Well, I wasn’t the one that found the furniture, so yeah, she’s off camera right now, but we can blame Jill. Is that okay?
Marc Fisher: Yeah, that’s perfectly fine. We blame her for everything anyway.
Rob Stott: That’s awesome. Mr. Marc Fisher, president of sales here at Origin, and Todd Anderson. We just did this: director of product experience. So I appreciate you both inviting me into your home, your recently redesigned home, which I’m excited to talk about, ahead of InfoComm here, too, a great, exciting, eventful week. So thank you.
Marc Fisher: My pleasure. Yeah, welcome. We’ve been working many, many years to get to where we are and we still have many, many more years to go, but it is a fun process. We have a great team of people here in Vegas that work every single day to come in and redesign, re-outfit, move things, and make this place what it is, which is our home.
Rob Stott: Yeah, and we see them actively doing it, which is awesome. I know, Todd, you took me through a little bit of a demo here out in the space, one that I know you’re still fine tuning because the finishing touches are going on. So talk about it. You’ve been in the space since you said 2015, is that right? Roughly. So 11, 12 years. But a lot is going on now to upgrade it and redesign. So talk us through the space and what’s happening here.
Marc Fisher: Yep, 12 years.
Todd Anderson: So we’re actually doing quite a big construction project. We’re trying to show a lot of the categories that we have. We have the architectural, we have the landscape, we have the performance theater products, and we’re really trying to give these dedicated spaces their true space in our showroom. So we’ve been updating the showroom. It’s really nice. We’re actually layering control in there now as well. Crestron’s been helping us out. We’re really excited about that. So full automation, lighting control, shades soon.
Todd Anderson: But really what we want to do here is be able to have all of our products at the touch of our fingertips. So if you want to hear one sub with one set of speakers, we can click and pick and do that for our customers coming in. So again, a lot of backbone needs to go in. Crestron’s helping us out to do the control layer. But yeah, we’re really trying to show all these categories and really give the right view.
Rob Stott: And when you say touch, like different buttons on a screen. I watched you do it. Walk me through the demo of it. You had pictures of the room that we were in, and literally just with a couple taps on your screen, of the speakers in their specific locations, you were able to customize the demo. That’s not what it used to be, right? So up until recently, talk about what it was like, what it used to be.
Marc Fisher: We would be sitting in the theater and we would just yell, “Yo, Todd,” and Todd would come running out of the room with an iPad and his phone in his hand.
Marc Fisher: And we’d flip light switches and try to make things work. It almost felt like a consumer’s home, where there’s just a lot of remotes and a lot of buttons and a lot of things to make work. And our industry is about making that simpler for people. We call it automation, we call it customization, we call it control, and it’s just simplifying the life of the technology in people’s homes. And we’re a piece of that.
Marc Fisher: We’re the end result. We’re delivering an incredible experience to our customers and we want to make it as simple as possible. So working with the right partners, like Crestron in our building, has made a huge difference for our demos, so much so that now we encourage more dealers to come to our building and we encourage them to bring their customers. We’re in Las Vegas for a reason. It’s a lot of fun here. So yeah, we want people to come out and experience what this guy has been working on.
Rob Stott: Yeah, and it’s impressive. So talk about that. I know, in terms of bringing people here, you have a great event planned this week while we’re here with the Crestron team, bringing some of their dealers in and showcasing this experience that they’ve helped create here. What’s the goal of having a space like this? What’s possible for the dealer that comes in?
Marc Fisher: You look at a lot of the dealers today and some have beautiful showrooms and great experiences, but most do not. And we want to help give interior designers, architects, builders, and dealers themselves a place to bring their customers to experience technology. Sometimes heard, sometimes seen, sometimes not seen, but allow them to experience what they can do in their home.
Todd Anderson: It’s nice, too, when we bring customers into our showroom, it brings them out of the sales situation. If you’re in a dealer’s showroom, you’re in their place. But when they’re coming here, they’re getting a tour. They’re seeing what we do, they’re seeing our culture. They’re not just seeing the product. They’re getting an experience of the product in the long run, but that experience is through the tour and the demos. And it’s a little bit different. So we find when we get customers coming here, they’re saying, “I didn’t think about that product over here.” And even if they’re not looking for a certain category, they see that category and they think, “That might work in my house here,” or “Why didn’t I think about that?” And the projects just grow, and it just secures what the dealer already spoke to the customer about.
Rob Stott: Well, and to those experiences, I’ll walk through, we’ll make sure there’s video rolling over top of this to showcase what it is. Walk us through the different rooms that are in here and the layouts and what you guys are trying to showcase.
Todd Anderson: So we have our main experience center. In our experience center, we don’t really want to show the products. That’s where we have our commercial products that are kind of hidden, where you’re not really seeing them. We have the pendants and you have a really good coverage of audio, but you don’t see exactly where it is. Then we have our architectural audio, and we have our game cave. That’s where we have our games and our pool table, but that’s where we have our whole architectural audio line, where you can click and pick. Here are the 5-inch line, the 10-inch line, and then we can go to our in-wall architectural line, show the in-wall subs. So that’s kind of our game cave, if you will.
Marc Fisher: Then you could really change and jump into the theater and see our huge theater products, where we have over 40 speakers, a 20-person-seat theater, 21 now, where you can actually hear and feel like you’re in the movies. And then you step into our design center technology room. In that room, the products are designed to be heard but not seen. They’re supposed to be felt but not visually in the way of the home. And we work with a lot of architects, builders, designers to deliver that. And from there, where do we go?
Todd Anderson: Then we bring them into the cork room, we call that, but that’s where we have a bunch of room treatments. Room treatments are really nice to show because people think of room treatments as the theater. But a lot of times we have these houses that have glass and all these open areas. So we like to show room treatments in more living-room-style areas. We have the cork room with a bunch of different finishes, but that’s where we’re showing our soundbar solutions. It’s always nice to talk about anchored audio. We always talk about the distributed coming from over here, but when you’re watching that video, you do want to have the audio coming from the video. So we have a whole line of soundbars that we show with two different technologies, one with our Origin silk dome and then one with our Ambisonic ribbon, both for different purposes. And then we bring them back to design services.
Marc Fisher: And design services is where we can actually show the customer’s home. We take their home, we put the products throughout their home, we can show the dispersion of the products, we can show placement, we do the full design and hand that back over to the dealer so that they can discuss that with the customer back in their own place. And then, of course, when you jump into the back, which is our warehouse and actually our manufacturing room, where we actually build and design a lot of products right here in the USA.
Rob Stott: Yeah, it’s incredible.
Todd Anderson: And then we kind of wrap it up back in the experience center and we sit down with the customer and go through the design that we did and talk about what they liked and what they want to hear, and go from there.
Rob Stott: Yeah. Thankfully, I joke about the height of the chair that she brought me, but Jill did a phenomenal job walking me through, doing the tour of the space and showing all that. I got to experience all of that already, from the theater room to the indoor/outdoor kind of commercial space that’s over there. I’m glad you keep bringing up, Marc, the architects, builders and designers, because it’s apparent in a lot of what you’ve done here in the space. I know online, too, just perusing your website, you’ve got a great slogan right when you land on the website about design-centric technology, something that’s been obviously a topic of importance to Connected Design. It’s kind of in our name. But the channel as well, right? About being more connected with that A, B, D community. Talk about how that’s influenced a lot of what’s gone on here lately with Origin.
Marc Fisher: I guess you could say it’s a good thing and it’s a bad thing in a way. We are audio gurus at heart. And what we want are big speakers that move a lot of air. We want them to be proud. We want them to be loud. We want them to be visual because audio is supposed to be fun and exciting. But that’s not always the case. And it’s really based upon the houses that are being designed today. You don’t always have the ability to do that. So the goal is to take the technology that we’ve been working on and building from our founders back in the ’60s and ’70s, all the way till now, and allow it to work with the environment in the home. And that’s taken a lot of work to do, but we’ve really kind of nailed it down.
Todd Anderson: Yeah. One of my favorite examples of this is we have our new Marquee sub. It’s a really powerful sub, two 10-inch drivers. I mean, it really rocks. But we take and we smush that design down and we make the driver fit into a standard two-by-four stud bay. So you’re getting that power, that performance, but you don’t have it taking up the whole room. So whether it’s something that we’re making that’s really small, just background audio, or something that’s performance, we’re taking design no matter what. Design for installation, designed for how it looks when it’s done, and designed for how it’s important.
Rob Stott: Yeah. And I even think back to walking through the warehouse and seeing the manufacturing that goes on here, the paint colors and how custom they can get. It’s really wild from the creative… I get it, but the grills too, being able to print things onto the grill, it’s wild.
Marc Fisher: It blends right in so that people don’t see it, but they can still dance in their kitchen and not know where it’s coming from.
Rob Stott: Well, also, from you guys internally to be able to do all of that as well has to be just a major benefit.
Marc Fisher: It’s been a challenge. It’s hard. Doing custom work is hard. Matching to the ceiling tile or matching to a backsplash or whatever the case may be, it takes a lot of work. And what makes all of this click for us is the people. We have over 50 people that work here at Origin just in our headquarters here, and we have a great team. We have a family that works together to try to create solutions and a great experience for our customers.
Todd Anderson: I was going to say one thing that I really like, too, about our team is we always like to take it to that next level and make it perfect. Bob, our printer, he’s been working with us for quite some time, and he brought us a grill that, hey, if we just shape the grill a little bit different, I could print all the way to the edges. So we actually went and retooled all of our grills to do that to make him happy, but also to make it perfect. And it’s not something that anybody probably would have noticed, but maybe a designer would. And if we do things right with that passion, it just really follows through into the project.
Rob Stott: The challenges, right, of wanting to show off the tech but still understanding the community that integrators and manufacturers are trying to get a lot closer to. What’s been key, in your mind, to being more successful or to have the designers and architects out there hear the message that you’re trying to deliver and just work more closely with them?
Marc Fisher: Yeah, it’s getting them here. We have to get them here. You have to experience it. Let me show you how this sounds is very hard to do. Let me write it down and tell you how it sounds is very hard to do. Out of everything in the home that is put in, we’re the only thing that can create an emotional experience. We’re something that people hear and it changes the way you feel. It’s very hard to do that on paper. It’s hard to do that on a website, hard to do that on a webinar. The only time you can really do it is in a real listening experience. So we are selling fun. I mean, that’s what we do. We manufacture products that deliver fun to people’s homes. So to all the interior designers, the dealers, the architects, the builders, everybody that’s in this business that wants to truly engage and have it a part of their home, you have to go experience it in the location.
Rob Stott: Yeah. And I know, too, part of that is you guys getting out there as well, right? NKBA was a new one, the Builders’ Week. So what was that experience like? What have you heard about that experience?
Marc Fisher: I wasn’t there. Were you there?
Marc Fisher: It was almost overwhelming how big the community is. It’s an enormous community. And let’s face it, we’re a very, very small part of what goes into the home. When you look at a total home build, we’re a small percentage. But what’s interesting is we’re the percentage that is fun and is creating impact. So trying to change that mentality of a builder’s mind or a designer’s mind. They want to sell houses and they want comfortable sofas and beautiful artwork and great designs. We’re a tiny little piece of that.
Marc Fisher: Todd talked earlier about acoustics. Can I tell you how many times we’ve been in a room and it’s a high vaulted ceiling with glass and they go, all right, this room’s going to be the theater. And you’re like, how are we going to make this work? Because they don’t really think about that. And everybody listening to this would even know what it’s like to walk into a restaurant and try to have a conversation with your better half, and you can’t hear them because it’s too loud. The noise in a home and how it makes you feel, it’s the same as the lighting is so important when you’re in the home, how the light makes you feel at night. Sound is the same way. Is the room loud when you walk through it? Do people hear you? Do you want it to feel soft and easy, or do you want it to be hard and crisp? Those are things that we can help control.
Rob Stott: But what’s next? What kind of things are you guys, I know we’re sitting here ahead of InfoComm, but what’s coming down the line that you can talk about that people should be excited about?
Marc Fisher: I can’t talk about it, but I can tell you that you absolutely need to come to CEDIA. I can tell you that we are going to be showing and releasing some new products and/or categories that will blow your mind away. It’s going to light up your world. So I strongly suggest that you make your way out to CEDIA this year. It’s in Denver. Last time, yeah.
Rob Stott: One last time.
Marc Fisher: We invest strongly into our dealers. And by investing strongly into dealers, you have to invest into the trade organizations that help make our industry better. And so we invest heavily into the show. And if you don’t have a CEDIA coupon to get in, let us know. We’ll get you one. But definitely make your way out there.
Rob Stott: Awesome. Cool. Well, Marc, Todd, this was awesome. I look forward to seeing you both in Denver. You can look down at us. Jill, make sure this stool comes with you guys so we can do this. No, this was awesome. I appreciate the time at your facility and checking this place out. It was a lot of fun. And I look forward to catching up down the line.
Marc Fisher: Hey, go Birds.
Rob Stott: Go Birds!
