Bang & Olufsen cut the ribbon on its refreshed retail concept–complete with a meeting space for custom projects–at its flagship Manhattan location Wednesday.
Bang & Olufsen CEO Tue Mantoni (left) and B&O America CEO Kathy Thornton-Bias (right) cut the ribbon at the new retail flagship store in Manhattan.
The coveted Madison Avenue address places the chic Danish audio company “in good company” with many other luxury brands, just a few steps from Apple’s iconic glass cube store, noted new B&O America president Kathy Thornton-Bias.
The new retail brick and mortar model “allows customers to experience new products in an unprecedented way,” Thornton-Bias said at the ribbon-cutting event.
The concept highlights three different zones. The B&O Play brand of mobile lifestyle audio gear greets patrons with hands-on opportunities to demo the portable speakers and headphones. The second zone features B&O’s flat-panels and a revolving wall of the company’s complete loudspeaker lineup, from the small cube BeoLab3 up to the full range BeoLab 18 towers and the BeoLab 19 dodecahedron-shaped wireless sub.
The third zone is a quiet and cozy back room where custom installers and other design professionals are invited to bring clients to demo and discuss fully integrated projects.
The New York store is the first of a handful that B&O is rolling out in the U.S. and North America, with Los Angeles and San Francisco being two of the other areas targeted, CEO Tue Mantoni said. Locations in Copenhagan and Shanghai were opened as a soft launch of the new retail concept to smooth out potential kinks in advance of the New York launch.
