There are things about the car audio industry many people don't know, or think about but they apply to almost every retail industry. 1)
Territories: This is a huge factor, or used to be. If shop A carries Kicker then shop B which is only 1.5 miles away can not carry Kicker because of the protected territory shop A was guaranteed by Kicker. This continues up the chain. There is also a middleman between Kicker and shop A. The shop may call him "the local Kicker rep" but he is really just another salesman. His job is to sell Kicker audio to car audio shops. he has a protected territory as well. It may be the Midwest, or an entire state, or just a city or county. Guess what? He marks up the product in order to make a profit before the shop even receives it. The rep may also sell more than one brand. For example: Back in my day the local Sony rep was also the local Phoenix Gold rep. So if you walked into a specialty shop and seen a PG amp you were likely to see some Sony ES products on the sound board as well.
This was how the industry operated for years and everyone was happy. Except the consumers. Why? Because the consumers were paying out the nose for a CD player that only cost about $12 to manufacture in China.
Along came the big box stores and the whole industry (local retailers) were in an uproar. The big box stores upset the whole situation. They skipped the local rep and went straight to the manufacturer. And the greedy manufacturers saw the potential profits the big stores promised. They immediately screwed the local retailers and started selling to the big chain stores. To appease the local retailers and the snooty "audiophiles" they created brands like Mobile ES, Excelon, and Premier that were supposedly only available at specialty retailers and not the big box stores.
Upscale brands like Orion created lesser brands to sell to the chain stores. Remember The Hott Setup and the Hifonics Hawk amplifiers?? Some were successful and some were not. Some brands didn't sell to the big box stores but instead created lesser product lines at a lower price point so the specialty shops could compete on price. Remember the PPI Sedona series, the Rockford Series 1, and Phoenix Gold Sapphire?
This was the beginning of the downward spiral. Gone was the competition to make the best product. Now everyone wanted to make the most profitable, and yet lowest price product. The competition left the sound off lanes and went to the Sunday sale papers.
There were rumors that some of the larger local reps received some payoffs to compensate for the loss to the big box retailers but I can not confirm that.
Some brands held out, Only selling to smaller specialty shops until they went bankrupt and were devoured, masticated, and crapped out of Korea by DEI. //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/verymad.gif.3f39c5c2fd57527b671fad3efdfac756.gif
The next step in this evolution is the internet. We've bypassed the local retailer, the local rep, and now the big box store. Some companies will fail, some will succeed. Now we have ED, Fi, Sundown, etc all of which are almost exclusively "internet brands"
Kicker still promises protected territories to it's retailers but at any one time you can find 500-1000 listings for Kicker products on
ebay alone. Not to mention all the other "non-authorized" retailers selling Kicker on the internet. Do you really think Kicker doesn't know how those products are getting there? They know, but they're enjoying the profits too much to care. And I'm not picking on Kicker , I just pulled their name off the top of my head. There are plenty of other companies doing the same thing
And don't forget
Crutchfield. That's a whole 'nother story.
