Usually when a distributor hosts a dealer event, we end up at a hotel, but this year Erikson Consumer opened the doors of their Montreal headquarters for an intimate look at the products that will be rolling out over the next year.
“Many of our retail partners have never had the opportunity to visit our head office” stated Nataliya Potapova, Erikson Consumer’s Director of Marketing. “Having our dealer show at our location gives our partners a chance to experience the scope and breadth of our location including a look at our 150,000 sq’ state of the art warehouse, and to experience the other teams within the company that they may not be familiar with.”
Erikson divided their suppliers into ten unique rooms. The first room we visited was dedicated to Marshall, an appropriate brand with such a rock n’ roll pedigree to be housed in the Erikson soundstage. This room is normally set up to resemble a concert stage to demonstrate professional lighting and musical instruments, a part of the Erikson business that we do not normally get to experience. Cleverly, Marshall portable speakers and headphones were set up on the stage to look like a band. A big photo of Billie Joe Armstrong, the lead singer for indie-band Green Day and brand ambassador for the Marshall brand created the backdrop.
The highlight of the Marshall room was a new limited-edition Stanmore 3 Bluetooth speaker in baseball glove brown (the Stanmore is normally only in black to resemble the look of a Marshall amplifier). Another special colour was the Marshall Monitor III noise-cancelling headphones shown in white. Both special editions will be available commencing Q2 2025.
Our tour continued into a boardroom dedicated to mobile accessories, with brands such as Gadget Guard, Atom Studios and Urbanista. Often, dealer shows offer a window to what we should be covering editorially in the coming months. This room tells us that there is a growing category dedicated to cell phone safety that includes radiation protection devices with a product called Alara from Atom Studios, that reduces damaging RF Signals, as well as special screens that assist in eyesight safety. We will be digging into this emerging category in detail over the coming months.
No tour from Erikson would be complete without a mention of Swedish lifestyle audio brand Urbanista. We have watched this company grow over the past 15 years and always look forward to their next city-named product. This year it’s the “Valencia” over-ear noise cancellation headphones; a foldable design with a battery life of 50-hours and a retail price that we are told will be about $100.00. We will get our hands on the Valencia for a full review but from the few minutes we had a chance to listen to these headphones, they seem ridiculously fantastic for such a low price! We are somewhat surprised that Urbanista remains the only headphone company that are incorporating solar panels into headphone bands and earbud carrying cases as a means for charging. I have owned a pair of Urbanista “Los Angeles” over-the-ear headphone for close to three years and I have yet to charge them in the wall. When they are not in use, they sit on a windowsill and are fully charged within a few hours. This is a technology we’d be excited to see adopted by other brands too.
We recently published a review of our experience with a number of Victrola turntables that you can read here, so I won’t spend too much time explaining the brand, except to mention a new outdoor speaker that Victrola is releasing that is Bluetooth enabled and solar powered! After an initial wall charge, the speakers sit in the garden and daisy-chain their Bluetooth feed from one speaker to the next. The sun tops up the battery for up to 50 hours of playtime. We like the look of these new speakers – they no longer pretend to look like rocks.
Erikson Consumer has acquired an impressive list of British audio companies to represent that include Arcam, AudioLab, Cyrus, Spendor, ifi and Mission all of which were on display. We are most excited about the new 9000 series from AudioLab, a new flagship range of integrated amplifiers. An interesting note on AudioLab: the 8000 series was the company flagship that was released 40 years ago. The new 9000 series is a very big deal for the brand, and we hope to get our hands on one for a full review.
Moving along on the tour, we were introduced to two new JBL portable Bluetooth speakers: the Flip 7 and the Charge 6, the latest and greatest in their respective series. Both the Flip 7 and Charge 6 benefit from what JBL calls an ‘audio processing algorithm’ called AI Soundboost that can analyze and EQ your music in real time. These new portables also have a new button called Auracast that will pair and stream music to other Auracast speakers. So if you play a song on a Charge 6, it will also simultaneously play on the Flip 7 when Auracast is enabled. If you own two Flip 7 speakers you can also use Auracast to play right and left stereo.
Finally, we moved into the last boardroom that featured Erikson Consumer’s Wellness brands that included personal massagers, chair massagers, small fridges and a slew of other products to make you feel great. The one that caught our attention was the Eyeris 3 Eye Massager from Renpho. Looking like a pair of ski goggles, the product delivers an eye and temple massage and can be programmed with voice commands to provide either a soothing heat or cooling gel sensation. We had no idea that Renpho wellness products are in over 11 million households worldwide!
Also on display in the wellness section were personal massage chairs from an Erikson distributed brand called Human Touch. We commend the direction of Human Touch that seem to be making more streamlined and aesthetically pleasing chair designs, compared to the horrendous eyesores from year’s past. In the video embedded in this story, we show the gorgeous Human Touch “Perfect Chair” that reclines you to a zero-gravity position while still looking great!
This show report is just a snippet of what we saw, but we have taken lots of notes and we look forward to getting our hands on many of the products we experienced for full reviews over the next few months.
