“We are on a 1,000-mile journey, and we’re only about 500 miles into it,” says John Heyman, CEO of Snap One, in reference to the ambitious plans the company has ahead.
That journey has taken the Charlotte, N.C.-based company from its humble beginnings in 2000 to become the bellwether company in the smart home industry. Snap One holds several unique positions in the market as:
- The leading brand specified and installed by custom integrators in more than 20 categories of equipment
- Both a manufacturer and a distributor
- One of the few pure-play publicly owned companies in the custom integration industry.
Heyman, along with Chief Product Officer Paul Hess, spoke with CE Pro about what the past year has been like, offered their outlook for 2023 and beyond, and provided a few glimpses of what might lie ahead in terms of a product roadmap and how they plan to help integrators thrive, operate more efficiently (especially in regards to service), and eventually build recurring monthly revenue (RMR).
“I joined this company 8 years ago as an outsider to this industry,” says Heyman, whose background was in building software and devices for restaurants and retailers. He says that even though Snap One was still a “baby” at that time, it had “an amazing culture that was built by integrators. I saw an amazing group of people, an amazing way to go to market in terms of e-commerce, an amazing set of products and an amazing culture.”
He says the company has maintained its core principles throughout its journey to make dealers’ lives easier by building better products, better platforms and bringing them to market in an integrator-centric manner. Heyman notes the company continues to invest heavily in product development. That investment was never more on display than in the past few years during the supply chain crisis.
Snap One Spent $40M to Maintain Supply Chain
According to Heyman, Snap One spent $40 million “real dollars” to maintain the necessary product supply for dealers. That meant investing in engineering, fighting back inflation and price increases when possible, and spending enormous amounts on componentry.
Hess notes that in the past two years, Snap One has launched more than 120 new products representing more than 600 SKUs. He says the reason the company was renamed as Snap One was to bring together a long-term vision for integrators and end user customers.
“We can’t publicize that vision, unfortunately, but we’ve been dropping a lot of what I call breadcrumbs along the way,” he notes.
Part of that vision was also the expansion of the Snap One Partner Stores.
“Four years ago we had zero brick and mortar locations. Today we have almost 40,” says Heyman, noting that growth was in response to integrators wanting a more localized presence.
“We are now in the midst of joining the Snap AV and Control4 portals. Last week was the first week integrators were able to buy Control4 products on the Snap AV portal. That’ll be launched to the general market soon. (Only certified Control4 dealers can buy Control4 products on the Snap portal.) We’ve been continuing to invest in other elements of our ecosystem. This is a journey.”
Hear more from Heyman and Hess by watching or downloading the podcast above. Find past episodes of the CE Pro Podcast by subscribing to the CE Pro YouTube channel or our Apple and Spotify podcast feeds.