(Design)Under his guidance, Bang & Olufsen has undergone a strategic transformation, focusing on what Teär calls “luxury timeless technology”—a philosophy that marries the brand’s rich heritage with learnings from the modern luxury industry. The Swedish-born CEO, who sits down exclusively for a rare one-on-one interview with Maison Ë, reveals that now is the time to start shouting about the brand’s success. “When I show people the bespoke products we are making, their response is typical—‘wow, I’ve never seen anything like this before,’” says Teär, who has just jetted into Copenhagen from his home base in Switzerland. “My response is that ‘nobody has,’ because we haven’t told our story well enough. This is what we’re doing now. We’re beefing up the brand over the next five years—pushing our marketing, communications, and retail execution globally. In five years’ time, many more people will know what this amazing company is all about.”

These words of optimism come from a renewed sense of mission that the CEO has instilled in the company, whose recent financials reveal growing consumer demand in the all-important Asia Pacific market. When Teär took the helm five years ago, the company lingered at a crossroads, straddling the line between consumer electronics and luxury. Like most in its category, it took a beating during the pandemic, but Teär—who notes the brand enjoyed its most successful year of his tenure last financial year—says a strategic path buoyed by B&O’s one-of-a-kind products lies ahead. “Before, we were one foot in consumer electronics, one foot in the premium market, maybe halfway into luxury,” he says. “Now we’re focused on taking the best from the past, adding new capabilities, and pushing to be the world’s most successful luxury audio company.”

Maison ë. Why do you feel so confident about this brand’s future?

Kristian Teär I’m optimistic because we stand alone as a luxury audio provider and have our own blue ocean. It’s a fascinating world to be in luxury, and it’s perfect for us because no one can copy what we have done to be here. To be luxury, you need to have brand heritage, you need to have pricing power, you need to have distribution, and you need to have bespoke capabilities. We have all these assets and design pieces to stand the test of time with upgradeable software and repairable and serviceable products. And, of course, we are a leader in acoustics and audio. If you look at cars, you typically have five, six or seven leading luxury car brands. If you look at watches, you have five or six different brands. If you look at fashion, you have many brands. Yet, nobody else can do what B&O is doing, and that’s why it’s so exciting for us to go there and do more of that and find our own ways of being different. We think differently.

M.Ë “Think different.” sounds familiar as a slogan.

k.t. That slogan was coined in our company in 1961, long before the “other” company was founded. We have always thought differently. If you look at our product designs, you will see that, and if you look at how we have implemented features, you will see it too. “Thinking differently” is in our DNA, and it’s not something we have to invent now to succeed. We just need to do more of it.

M.Ë Very few electronic brands have your kind of heritage. What’s the secret ingredient to this longevity?

k.t. Bang & Olufsen has been around for 99 years, and we will celebrate our 100th anniversary next year, which is absolutely amazing. There are no brands in our industry that have been around this long. When our founders, Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen, started out, they made battery eliminators for radios. Still, their commitment to uncompromised quality and the will to keep innovating was baked into the brand from this early point.

M.Ë How big is Bang & Olufsen today?

k.t. Our annual turnover is around €400 million, and we are about 1,000 people. We have a key base close to Copenhagen in Lyngby, but the brand’s birthplace is in Struer, on the west coast of Denmark, and this is where production and our repair business remain today. We are very proud to have our factories and people working in our factories in situ in Denmark, where the company was born almost 100 years ago.

M.Ë It’s a very competitive landscape that you’re in, competing with tech giants across the pond in the US. What do you think you were doing to make last year your most successful year? You feel more like a luxury brand than an electronics brand at this point.

k.t. We don’t want to be in the consumer electronic market because we have luxury attributes others cannot copy. We are moving as far away as possible from the black plastic and white plastic consumer electronic market and into the luxury world because of our attributes concerning both timelessness and technology. There are a lot of consumers out there who want the best experiences, and we can provide that for them. That also means that we can put more effort into craftsmanship. We can put more effort into the materials that we use. We can also put more effort into the engineering that we do. Of course, because we charge for it, our products have a longer life and a residual value that differs significantly from the consumer electronics industry. If you bought a Beosound 2 four or five years ago, you could still sell it second-hand for a comparable price now—which is unheard of in the consumer electronics industry. This turntable, the Beogram 4000, which we still restore today, was prized at €300 when it was launched in 1972, and people will now pay over €10,000 for a factory-recreated version. This shows not just the longevity but the desirability of our products, and that’s why we don’t want to compete with anybody else in the consumer electronic space. We’re in the luxury space and we believe we have our own blue ocean there. Our brand is tough for anybody to copy because of its strength, craftsmanship, and the services we attach to the product. It all makes us unique.

M.Ë One of the things we love about your brand is that your design classics hold their value. But obviously, objects deteriorate over time. We’d love to hear about your efforts to help restore old pieces and how that works within the business model.

K.T. So, first of all, we build products that will last for a long, long period. That’s the whole point of our design and engineering philosophy, and we have had that for many years. Regarding restoration, I’ll give you an example from a customer in Paris who bought our CD system, Beosystem 9000, a CD player where you can load six CDs at a time. He purchased this with his first paycheck. As the years passed, it always held prominence in his living room and moved from house to house with him and his family. After 32 years, it stopped working, and he, of course, was devastated. But he got in touch with us and brought the system into our store in Paris, from where it was shipped back to our factory, where it was then repaired and restored—and we even gave him a new warranty on the product. Stories like this happen all the time—we had a customer in Spain who sent back our Beoplay A8 after it must have fallen from a height of three or four meters and was trashed entirely. Our engineers wanted to rebuild it because they knew they could and are passionate about doing it, which delights our customers. This is who we are; our designs are so beautiful that they can last many years. But the tech needs to keep up. Today, when we develop new products, we do that on the identical product platform for all products. Clients can also rest assured that if there’s new technology coming ten years or fifteen years from now, the software team will keep on developing on that platform to get access to all of those software services in the future. So when people buy something from us, they can trust that it’s something they can pass on to the next generation.

M.Ë The way you describe the longevity of the products and the care in the construction and design, it feels more like you’re speaking about a brand like Hermès rather than an electronics company. How much is this European, high-end luxury world influencing you?

K.T. We have always been working this way, but we need to be more apparent in articulating this alongside our broader vision, which we do today. No one else is doing what we do. Our current strategy revolves around luxury and timeless technology, and this is unique to us because we have the heritage, we have the brand, and we are creating highly desirable products. We also have distribution channels to share this product and story with around 400 stores where people can go and experience our products and get well-serviced pre-sales and post-sales. These are all attributes of a modern luxury brand. On top of this, we have a growing customization and bespoke service, which we’re seeing many more examples of in the luxury space, which has been a strong strategy for us.

M.Ë How custom can you be when dealing with wealthy clients, particularly those who know they want to spend money on something very special?

K.T. We try to please our customers, regardless of their wishes and needs. We can make a product in any color, fabric or wood they might want. It’s just up to the client’s imagination. We have that capability in our atelier studio in our factory—a factory in a factory that can do small quantities down to one. This can be done on both speakers and smaller wearables. Of course, we charge to it, and it will cost customers a lot of money for one-off Bang & Olufsen pieces specified to their requirements. But our clients desire to get what they want in the way they want it, which is why we are here. And again, we’re the only ones who can provide this. Hence, our customers turn to us for exceptional pieces—if they want the birch tree outside their home converted into some lamellas on a B&O speaker, we will come and take the tree down for them, and we dry it out and then build the piece from that tree.

M.Ë That’s amazing. Is this where luxury is heading today, promoting uniqueness, one-offs, and something extraordinary for the customer?

K.T. We’ve seen that in the car industry. If you look at Ferrari, the latest quarterly report shows that the margins and profits come from bespoke and customization. The same goes for other car brands and watches. So we are well equipped to service customers’ needs for different things and custom-made products.

M.Ë For those top-tier clients, could you provide some examples of what you describe as best-in-class customer relationships?

K.T. Ultra-high net worth individuals have high demands, but all our customers have high demands on audio quality—that’s what we do after all—as well as beautiful designs. We do that for all price points, be it €249 or €349,000. All our products need to sound amazing, and they need to look amazing. In more extensive installations, if you go to big homes, it’s more complicated because it’s also integrated into home automation systems. And yeah, they need to work in a few different ways, but we want to make sure our customers are serviced well and happy to boot—and we have a network of dealers and partners helping us do just that.

M.Ë You’re in a very fortunate position. There’s a love for the brand, which means organically, Bang & Olufsen finds its way into the conversation around culture. But simultaneously, you’re pushing yourselves through collaboration—you’ve worked with Ferrari, Riva and Bentley. What are these collaborations like? How do you choose the partnerships, and how do you make them successful?

K.T. We are fortunate to have iconic products featured in movies, and celebrities buy and use them and are then caught on camera with our products. That’s good because it shows we’re making desirable products. When it comes to collaborations, we work with brands that have similar values and mindsets. Ferrari (for whom we did Bang & Olufsen product collaborations) is also about craftsmanship, design and performance—and so are we. The philosophy in Maranello is the same as our philosophy in Struer, so we are about the same thing. Enzo Ferrari wanted to win—and our founders had the desire to be the best, too. We have customers in common, so if you’re a Ferrari customer, you’re already likely to know about the B&O brand. Then we can sell them products, but it’s the same for Ferrari. Our customers are a target group for them as well.