Business Model

“We knew the big audio dealers were not going to take a chance on a new unfunded startup ran by a bunch of “punk kids”. We knew winning these dealers took big advertising, rapid branding, excellent salesman, buy-in incentives, competing brand buyouts and none of it was in the cards for us. Zu was (and still is) hell-bent on building the company on performance. Any money we scrapped together went back into product, not advertising. Zu was an old school, punk rock band from the beginning.”

Sean Casey and Adam Decaria incorporated and launched Zu in the fall of 2000. From inception their business model was clear: invent, engineer, manufacture and market the highest-performance products, and sell direct to the user at reasonable prices. Zu believes that applying innovation to products, marketing and customer service, while continuously improving efficiency, are the keys to Zu’s success.

The internet and electronic commerce were gaining real traction in the late 1990’s and it was apparent the new system allowed for a close, and responsive relationship between manufacture and user, one without all the middleman noise and heavy markup of the old audio distribution and retail channels. Adam and Sean knew that manufacturing in the states and not overseas was going to make competing on price difficult, but building stateside gave them an advantage in technology and performance—the big motivators for creating Zu in the first place. They also believed in the “local first” economic responsibility concept and wanted to keep fabrication at home. So, as the Japanese decades before, but this time via the internet, Zu believed they could build a better product and sell it direct to the user at a lower price.