Hej Christian (and Anders!)

Thanks for getting in touch.  That is very helpful to see your background and your passion for B&O.  Here is a quick introduction from me:-

I also became a B&O fan at a young age (my mother had a vintage Beogram 1000 when I was about 4 years old and I can still remember carefully raising and lowering the tonearm lever and enjoying the way the arm gently glided up and down ;)  I bought my first B&O system (a used Beocenter 3300) from a junk sale when I was about 13 and I spent months carefully restoring it back to life.

I'm from Leicestershire, England and I studied for an Electrical and Electronic Engineering degree back in the 1990s, before working for a national telecomms company specialising in cabling and telephone systems.  About 10 years ago, I started making music and audio cables for friends and then selling the spare cables on eBay.  This hobby soon took up all of my spare time and in 2008 I quit my day job to build B&O cables full time.

I now lead a team of three engineers in a small workshop where we design and test cabling and circuits to interface between B&O products and many other devices (the workshop also doubles as a home cinema and recording studio after the work is finished!)  Our cables are used by over 90% of the UK B&O stores, as well as by many others across Europe.

The key skills I can offer will be in getting different products to function well together, via electronics hardware and wired/wireless connections.  I have facilities to test audio products in the workshop, as well as plenty of enthusiasm!

If it is of interest, I will be visiting the ISE trade show next week in Netherlands, where B&O are exhibiting.  If you are planning to be there, it would be good to meet up.

You can reach me via email at steve@soundsheavenly.com and you can see more about what I do at www.soundsheavenly.com

Kind regards, Steve Marriott.

Looking forward to seeing what you come up with. I am simply a B&O lover - we had a Beovision 3400SJ when I was young and it was so much better than any TV I had seen before. I bought my first system when I was a medical student , worked my way up to about 100 systems before giving it all up and only have about 5 these days. I love B&O for the magic and I think this is what is needed today. Very difficult to achieve though as one big TV looks much like another. Technology is also very expensive to develop and the time scale to get back the R&D so short. Very into voice control at present.

Have a long history with Beoworld as was the first forum moderator and helped take it from one post a day to what it became in at least a small way. The secret then was responsiveness, and I think instant response is the key - B&O always worked with minimal input - the single key stroke - complex function made simple so it can be enjoyed by all but with no loss of control.

I deal in pre-owned Bang & Olufsen, and have done for the last 12 years professionally. Before that, I've been a B&O fan all my life (well, from the age of around 12, so that's 34 years of being a fan).

My knowledge of B&O is, errr, pretty good. There's not a great deal I don't know about products from the mid 1980's onwards. Before that period I have a good working knowledge and I've either owned or handled most products from the late 1960's onwards.  Anything before that, I just ask Martin (Dillen) who knows pretty much every vintage product ever made (and beyond), right down to component level!

I'm a huge fan of 'keeping it simple' - and I think many companies are totally and utterly missing the point when it comes to user interfaces.  I'd guess around 0.0001% of buyers get excited about sitting down in earnest to have a damned good read of the instruction manual.  A User Manual should be there as a last resort.  Any piece of AV should either have the simplest on-screen / on-display controls - or be so simple to use you can just plug and play. The set-up of the the Play products is a good step towards this - I've been impressed on a few occasions actually.

As mentioned in my previous thread, I'll be the miserable one who says "what's the point?" more often than not.  I think it's as good to have negative views as well as positive, if there are any, in order to stop an idea spinning off track.  When any idea is pitched at me I always look for negatives first. If there are too many negatives, it saves a lot of time and you can move on to another idea rather than getting all excited about a non-starter!!

I still don't fully understand exactly what you're looking to achieve though.  Are you looking to simply feed finished ideas to the 'Mother Ship'  for them to integrate into new products or are you looking to create a brand called 'Create - by Bang & Olufsen' to sell alongside 'Play' or main products in stores?

Lee

Hi All

First off - thank you so much for welcoming us onboard BeoWorld.

It’s a true pleasure to be here and even have a private space for us to engage with each other.

Let me start of by presenting myself.

I’m Anders. A husband of one and father of two. I live in Espergærde north of Copenhagen. Well, actually I’m rebuilding the house right now, so I’m very much in the market for exploring what B&O products to choose for the house – best part of the ‘building process’ if you ask me ;)

I joined B&O back in August 2016, to spearhead BeoCreate alongside Christian Thams, having responsibility on the strategy, marketing and commercial side of things.

So in B&O terms, I’m still the new guy – and I will be so for the next 9,5 years…

On a personal level, I’m not only super thrilled to be working on the inside of this true icon of a company. I’m also super thrilled to experience the passion around our brand in the world around us. Even though I’m born and (B&O) raised in Denmark the love for our brand keeps surprising me positively. The memories from my own childhood in the 80’s with B&O products still stand strong. The BeoVision 5000 was a central part of my parents’ home, but the BeoVision 6000 my grandfather had was always my favorite. I just loved pulling the slider back and forth to unveil and hide the screen. It felt magic every time.

Growing up in Denmark in the 80’s and 90’s, I also experienced first hand how any family (more or less…) owned at least one B&O product. Today, that makes up an entire generation of people like me more or less, that has first hand memories of our brand and products. Quite amazing.

Enough about the past for now. Fast forwarding from my childhood and into my professional career, I hold a Masters in Business Administration and Organizational Communication and I’ve spent just short of a decade in different ad agencies. Starting in the brand activation end of things working first hand with customers and ending up in the digital, strategic and creative end working with a much broader and top level scope. One of the agencies was one I founded in 2013, and after getting both Carlsberg and Republic of Fritz Hansen as clients, we got pretty busy, was acquired and I then acted as agency director of the acquiring agency until joining B&O in August 2016. My experience spands pretty broad and counts anything from Coca-Cola to ‘Kickstarters’, and it’s very much the entrepreneurial spirit, true brand passion and true hunger to make tomorrow better than todayt that I bring to the table in Create.

So in short, that’s me.

Happy to be aboard BeoWorld and I look forward to a range of exiting discussion in the time to come!

Let me start of by catching the ball you’ve just passed Lee in a separate post ;)

Best of regards

/Anders Buchmann

[quote user="9 LEE"]

I still don't fully understand exactly what you're looking to achieve though.  Are you looking to simply feed finished ideas to the 'Mother Ship'  for them to integrate into new products or are you looking to create a brand called 'Create - by Bang & Olufsen' to sell alongside 'Play' or main products in stores?

Lee

[/quote]

Hi Lee

Thanks for asking - and thanks for challenging. Let me start off by not being a politician and give you some straight answers:

Are you looking to simply feed finished ideas to the 'Mother Ship'  for them to integrate into new product. Finished ideas, no. Inspiration, learning and guidance, yes.

or are you looking to create a brand called 'Create - by Bang & Olufsen' to sell alongside 'Play' or main products in stores? No

Now please let me grab the chance to elaborate a bit. Our newly launched website tells the story of our mission quite on point, we think: 

9_LEE

Bronze

5738 posts

Posted February 13, 2017 at 14:45 GMT

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#1219895

So, if we were speaking frankly, you're looking to throw open the doors of the old 'IdeaLand' to see if the public can contribute?

Lee