A Visit to New York’s JBL Store

 

Located on one of the busiest corners of New York City’s vibrant SoHo neighborhood, the new JBL Store shines a hip yet approachable light on the eponymous audio brand’s portable, gaming, and party speaker products. We asked Jamie Feuss, the Director, Retail Store Experience at Harman International, about the audio company’s distinctive approach to brand storytelling and retail at both its JBL and Harman Stores across the globe.

What’s the history of Harman as a retailer, including the JBL Store?

I was brought in when Harman wanted to launch a store back in 2013. My background was not just Tweeter for many years; I was also with Apple retail. So I spent a good amount of time out in that world of tech and electronics and opening up new stores in new parts of the country. Harman was obviously a manufacturer only then, and I was drafted to figure out where we should build stores.

My first suggestion was that we needed to build a store in SoHo, but for a lot of reasons, we ended up putting the Harman Store in Midtown, and that’s where we signed a lease for that store. Midtown was the right spot to expand, or actually shine a light on all of our brands, everything from Mark Levinson, Revel, and Infinity speakers to the entire line of JBL products including Pro, Synthesis, and portable. Midtown is a great tourist spot — people go to Rockefeller Center and Fifth Avenue, but the area doesn’t generate money, at least, per square foot. Still, it’s a great location for a marketing venue. And marketing and brand storytelling is a lot of what the Midtown store does. We also, pre-pandemic, used it for a lot of events, maybe two or three a month — everything from hosting a partner for our car business to having a pro dealer come to visit. In that space, we have a bigger stage area, we use Martin lights, which Harman makes, there, and there’s a bit more space and a downstairs showroom area that’s a bit more of a traditional high-end hi-fi store, where we shine a light on the complete line of Mark Levinson products, AKG headphones, Revel speakers, and more. We also have down there a full-blown JBL Synthesis theater, the kind you’d have at home if you were a studio director. So that’s the story we wanted to tell at that store, the story of Harman and Sidney Harman and how he expanded into the world of professional audio and make the Harman connection to consumers who maybe are driving their Lexus with Mark Levinson in it.

The JBL Store in SoHo is considerably different and seems to cater to a younger, hipper crowd with its mix of stylish portable audio and gaming products. How did this store come about?

The folks I reported to remembered that I told them we really should have a store in SoHo versus Midtown, even before the pandemic, because of the demographic that we wanted for JBL, and the number of customers that we would see was going to be better than the ones in the offices around Midtown. My experience, not just at Apple but also at Tweeter, was that you try to put your stores where people actually are.

We had worked with design and architecture firm Gensler on the Midtown store as well as our store in Munich, so I knew their team well and so did Harman. We were pleased with what they had done so far and they knew all our products well. And the architect-designers that we worked with have deep knowledge of retail in general, because Gensler has a retail division that has done lots of stores, not just in New York but across the world. So we did a deep dive with them and said it’s really about JBL, so let’s focus on this in SoHo.

So tell us a little bit more about how the design of the store keeps that focus on JBL?

The building we settled on was chopped up to be two different spaces and it was too small, but it’s located on a corner with great exposure. However, it’s in a landmark district, so we couldn’t put big signage out on the front window. And what you inherit is also the door and the soffits and the windows that they’ve built. If I had my way, I wouldn’t have any emollient in between the windows, I’d have it wide open, but it is what it is.

That said, we wanted people who might be driving by or walking by, to see. And on the corner, if people look in from the street, they can see what’s inside. We realized we could make the digital displays in the store do anything we want them to do, and we could do the same with all the lights inside. So at night, we glow a little bit, almost like a spaceship, and during the holidays, or during an event, we’ll change up the video and the lighting, so it always looks a little bit different.

So for us, it was really about how can we use a moment when people walk by, what allows people to see through and not cut off lines of sight, what’s going to draw people in, and Gensler helped us figure that part out.

We really just focus on JBL here, even in the lighting and color design. So the little dot that looks like an exclamation point in the JBL logo neon sign on the back wall actually represents the original horn that JBL founder James B. Lansing created for the speaker. Now, if you look at the store’s floor, the little stage is the same orange color and it’s shaped like the dot of that horn, which makes more sense when you look closely at the floor and see that we ran the rest of the horn all the way to the back, where even the ceiling and back wall are orange.

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