Here are two car audio shops that are scoring big in advanced driver safety, a category that many retailers still shy away from.
California Sounds, Campbell, CA and Sound FX, Lewes, DE both entered driver safety in 2014, rode the learning curve and are now reaping the benefits.
For California Sounds, driver safety now accounts for a whopping 65 percent of its expeditor business and 25 percent of its retail sales.
Two years ago, a car dealer called and asked if owner Raymond Sarin, if the shop could install a certain camera in a Toyota. He lied and said yes and from there he hasn’t looked back.
“It’s huge. I have two out of five installers who work full time on just this doing sensors and blind spot monitoring and safety,” Sarin said, referring to the expeditor part of California Sounds which serves 17 car dealerships.
“I do a lot of work with the dealerships and a large number of their customers are requesting driver safety. The entry level and even the high end cars don’t have it, so they’re getting the customer requests, and in turn, referring them to us,” said Sarin.
After seeing sales take off in expediting, Sarin put a sign out at his retail shop saying, “Backup Cameras, Backup Sensor and Safety.” “That alone drove a lot of people into the store because people want it. They just don’t know where to go get it,” he said.
That was the summer of 2014. Now he’s doing about 15 to 20 driver safety installations a week on the retail side.
Most of the business is in parking sensors. Blind spot monitoring is also big as is collision avoidance. “We get a lot of people who call us and say I was on vacation and I rented a car that had these great features,” meaning blind spot detection. “We hear a lot of that.”
At first, most driver safety customers were in the 50-plus category, but in recent months the shop is seeing a lot of parents with teens who are looking for as much safety in the car as possible. One woman came in with her 16 year old daughter who had a new Jeep Cherokee that she crashed twice in 4 months. She bought a $600 blind spot monitoring system with side cameras, and a back up sensor plus front and rear cameras.
At the car dealers, Sarin leaves fliers in the waiting rooms of the service department and he gets calls.
“A really big market for this is fleet accounts. We’ll go to the Chevy dealer that has a fleet accounts. We just did 20 trucks for a paving company. Commercial trucks are mostly stripped down trucks. We found out that these commercial companies, electrical, plumbing, paving, they want their trucks equipped with as much safety as possible,” Sarin said. “We have a few fleet accounts that keep us pretty busy in his area.”
Without the shift into driver safety, sales would have been way down, he said.
The shop carries Echomaser, Pioneer, Metra , JL Audio, Focal. Morel, Viper, and Kenwood.
Sounds FX’s Approach to Driver Safety
When Honda came out with LaneWatch in late 2014, Sound FX Lewes, DE started to take driver safety seriously. Store VP Brian Layton decided to try it out for himself, installing it on his 2014 Silverado. He loved it.
The shop started producing YouTube videos of their side-camera installs and added driver safety to its new web site. Calls started coming in from customers.
Safety, including backup cameras, blind spot sensors and cameras, DVRs, and 360 cameras are now about 10 percent of Sound FX’s car audio business and Layton thinks it can go to 20 or 30 percent.
“Selling safety is a mindset, it’s an adjustment,” he said. Most clients won’t know anything about it until you paint a picture of the experience by talking about it and that means you have to install it in your own car.
It’s also an investment. Suppliers may have interfaces for the vehicles with larger screens like Ford and Toyota, but not every supplier will have a Nissan, or Mercedes or BMW solution. He made a point to get to the know the engineers at some of his suppliers so he could get the best information.
The shop spent time on trial and error installs finding out what works and didn’t work. “The payoff is being comfortable in the category, knowing you can have an educated conversation with the customer in terms of the real and solid benefits of the products,” he said.
He believes side cameras will be the next backup camera. Vendors will come out with more solutions and retailers should start getting the word out, he claimed.
Sound FX’s new YouTube video will show left and right side cameras in a 2017 Ford F250, an all new body style with a Sync 3 radio with 8-inch touch screen.
