MyerConnex Lining Up Many Jobs Now After Slow Start To Year
Custom installer MyerConnex, “after a fairly slow” January and February, is landing “a lot of jobs right now,” President Jon Myer told Consumer Electronics Daily Monday. Myer started MyerConnex in 2010 (CED July 1/10 p6), just a few months after the seven-store MyerEmco CE retail chain he ran closed its doors after 55 years (CED Feb 16/10 p1).
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But Myer told us Monday that he was getting “zero dedicated” home theater jobs and “very limited front projection” sales. “Most” of his business has been “distributed audio, Sonos, and large remodel,” he said. There was “no new construction” or pre-wiring of homes “to speak of” in the Washington, D.C., metro area that his company focuses on, he said. There were only “a couple one-off custom pre-wires but nothing exciting in terms of a trend just yet,” he said. Myer projected that 2012 sales will be up 15 percent over 2011. But he said it was “still so early in the year it is only an educated guess."
Myer told us in 2010 that he planned to rely on distributors to buy CE products, bypassing direct relationships with manufacturers. “We are narrowing the focus of what we do because we're not going to be in the retail hardware business” anymore, said Myer. “I'm no longer interested in trying to sell a lot of TVs,” he said then. Aligning with suppliers directly “sends you down a path where I've been and I don’t want to go again,” because “if you have a direct relationship you've got pressure” to sell a certain amount of product, “you've got new products roll out and you've got to carry them,” he said. And “frankly, the fulfillment from the direct manufacturers is significantly worse than it is through the distributor,” he said.
But he said Monday that MyerConnex was now using “a mix” of direct relationships with manufacturers and distributors. “Where it made sense (in terms of margin opportunity), and in cases where we are not required to stock inventory or display demos, we have direct relationships” now, he said. It was not a “real change in strategy,” but a matter of “who can reliably supply us the quickest” product, he said. SnapAV, a distributor to custom installers, “remains the best partnership for us” because it offers “great margins, solid product, free shipping, and next day delivery in most cases,” and it was “hard to beat that for an integrator,” he said. Manufacturers that MyerConnex is going direct with include Audioquest, B&W, BDI, Chief, Classe, Control4, Lutron, Middle Atlantic, NAD, Pakedge, Rotel, Sanus, Sonance, URC and Yamaha, Myer said.