Custom Speaker Pods Looks to Expand

Custom Speaker Pods, based in South Carolina, has been in business since 2007, making exact-fit, vehicle-specific, door-mount speaker pods.

While selling mainly to consumers, the company is currently looking to expand its direct to dealer distribution.  It currently sells to about 226 stores.

Custom Speaker pods are made with no bondo and no fiberglass, as a cost-effective alternative to custom door panels.

The company was founded by Brandon Shinoski, originally a process and manufacturing engineer by profession.  “It was something fun to do with my plastic manufacturing experience.  I spent my days developing products and processes for BMW exterior components, and nights making pods for bassheads,” said Shinoski.

What started out as a hobby in a garage became a full time business in 2018 and has since expanded to a 10,000 square foot facility in Duncun, SC.

A novice can use the pods as a bolt-on a solution and more advanced users can blend them into the door panel for a more seamless look.

The normal Custom Speaker Pods order is built to spec in two days with special dealer pricing for those that have joined the company network. A typical door panel pair is $198, and an A-pillar pod set is $135.  They can be installed in under an hour.

“The benefit to the dealer using our product is you have a customer come in who says, ‘I want everything—all the speakers in my door,’ and then he sees the estimate for fiberglass doors at $3,000 a door. He can walk out or be shown Custom Speaker Pods at $100 a door,” Shinoski said.

Custom Speaker Pods said it is one of the only companies making multiple speaker pods for a wide variety of vehicles, without bondo or fiberglass.

The benefits of the door pod,  Shinoski said, is “It looks better. Now you can see the speaker you spent all that money on, and you don’t have the plastic of the door panel to block sound. You can add more speakers and deeper speakers.”

Shinoski got started in the market after building speaker pods for his 1996 Caprice out of wood, fiberglass and bondo.  He received many requests to make more, so he developed a way to make them more affordably and on a larger scale. “Using my experience in the automotive industry, I built a vacuum forming machine, handmade some molds in my garage and began Customspeakerpods.com to make building custom car stereo doors easy and affordable.”