Mobile Showroom Offers New Way to Reach Customers

Building a showroom is one thing. It can provide education, entertainment and even inspire a sale or two.

But it's the fully automated home that really gives customers a feel for the possibilities, says Houston-based Home Media Professionals founder Eugene Kesselman.

"It's all of those things together -- everything in the digital experience home -- that will give [customers] the opportunity to ask, 'is this useful?' and 'do I really need this?'"

"I don't believe that people buy technology," he adds. "They buy experience. And there's no other way to shop an experience than to see it, hear it, feel it."

While Kesselman feels the fully automated home does a better job displaying home tech options than a conventional showroom, there are some drawbacks to that as well.

Commuting through traffic to visit a showroom does not sound like an appealing way to shop for the automated home.

So, how could Kesselman and his home theater and home automation company bring the showroom to the customers instead?

Technicians Behind the Wheel

The High-Definition Mobile Showroom is a 40-foot RV now worth about $150,000.

Complete with home theater, home automation display, digital whole-home audio sound and other automation products, the mobile showroom is Home Media Pros' answer to the aforementioned challenge of bringing the showroom to the customer.

"The first step was to analyze what our customers want," says Kesselman.

"What they wanted was a media room, a whole-house audio system and security and automation. Our next challenge was to take those three fairly large components and integrate them into one mobile home and make it so that they can enjoy them more than just one at a time and still maintain the home feel."

That may sound like a tall order, but it wasn't the biggest challenge. Time was the biggest challenge. Home Media Pros received the trailer August 17 and was slated to be at a show September 12 with what would be the finished RV.

"We had to convert the system to work both with 12-volt lighting and 120-volt lighting," Kesselman said, beginning a laundry list of puzzles that had to be solved well before the installation itself. "Fully running, the system consumes 70 amps of power. We had to provide a generator."

To add to the time-pressured challenge, Kesselman also ran into a few financial issues. "Typically," he explains, "when you build something like this, vendors would assist with the equipment. But when you have an idea that is a little to the extreme, only very few buy into the concept."

In case you're wondering, the RV is fully insured and has a built-in tracking device should someone try to steal it -- but, as Kesselman himself added, "that's another story."

The showroom integrates a full computer network. "So, to have a fully running computer network was a puzzle of its own," Kesselman says.

"You have to have enough IP addresses. We use a Cingular wireless card ... and that was the puzzle -- linking all of this."