Who started The Speaker Company? Where was it based? Why did it disappear after only a few years? These questions and more, directly from the source.
2017 was the 10 year anniversary of TSC, The Speaker company. Now, it's 2018. Throughout this year I plan on recounting some of the memories I have on getting this company off the ground, running it and finally watching a dream die. Here is my first post.
A Little History
The speaker company was the brainchild of Frank Sadowski a vice president and former Amazon executive who transitioned to D&M holdings, the company that owned Denon
, Marantz
, Boston Acoustics
and McIntosh 
among a few other high end audio companies.Quality Speakers at Half the Price
The idea was to introduce a mid-level speaker company that sold "Quality speakers at half the price", and do it only online. This was to be done within the confines of a company whose main day to day objective was to sell high-end audio product through retail only. More on how that affected the business later.
The Business Model
The business model was pretty straight forward. Go to Chinese manufacturers who had tools for discontinued models of major brands, make slight adjustments to either the design or audio features and sell them at a significant discount while still maintaining a 50% margin. Since tooling was such a big part of the startup cost this significantly reduced our cost base. Of course in 2017 this is nothing new. You can easily start up a company to sell almost anything if you have the know how and marketing skills to do so.
.
August, 2007
I joined TSC in August 2007 as the sole employee and the General Manager. The first order of business was to choose a logo. This as it turns out takes considerably less time in a small company than it does at some of the larger logo efforts I've been part of, like AT&T WorldNet where I started and ran www.att.net for almost 7 years. We have around 6 or 7 choices and in an afternoon we settled on the logo you see in the header of this blog.
The Goal
The goal was to launch this online only speaker company by December 7, 2007, about 90 days after I joined the company. Fortunately my working on startups at AT&T and RapidFax prepared me for this. Not to say it was easy, it was not. Frank was a great help as well as a font of information on ecommerce as well as the writer we hired, Len Schneider. Len was an audio industry expert and an incredible asset in helping get TSC off the ground. I also had the pleasure of working with Roland McBeth, a long time audio industry expert, who built and managed our product line.
Over the coming months I'll recount the trials, tribulations, celebrations and the truth about why TSC closed its doors.
