In the audio world, there are plenty of speakers that are cheap and play just fine.
If you stop and listen, though, you’ll start to hear major differences in quality between the cheap speakers and those from Klipsch Audio Technologies. And it’s those people who will take the time to stop, listen and appreciate the clarity that Klipsch Chairman and CEO Fred Klipsch wants as his customers.
Other companies are free to fight over being the low-cost commodity king to the “good enough” crowd; Klipsch wants to dominate in quality in every channel the company is in.
Klipsch and his wife, Judy, who bought the company from Fred’s 85-year-old second cousin in 1989, have seen Klipsch Audio post a 20 percent average annual sales growth over the last seven years, a period when audio component sales overall have been on the decline.
The secret is producing best-in-class products and adapting to meet the changes of a rapidly moving market.
“We’re not as concerned about how big we are as a company in terms of gross volume as much as we are concerned that the products we take to market are always best-of-class, high-performance products,” says Klipsch. “We don’t ever want to get to what I would call the commodity level, where we’re working on very small margins requiring very large volume for it to be profitable. We’re just always concerned that our products not only meet a solid quality standard and a solid cosmetic lifestyle standard, but always represent the product performance standard that everyone has grown to appreciate from us.”
