Holding to the timetable that Electronics Expo’s founder and president, Leon Temiz, set three years ago when he first opened for business, the CE retailer cut the ribbon just after Labor Day on a sixth New Jersey store, along the bustling Route 18 shopping corridor in the town of East Brunswick. On hand for the opening was local radio personality and founder and president of the Guardian Angels group, Curtis Sliwa; Electronics Expo advertises on Sliwa’s talk radio show, one of 15 radio stations used promotionally by the store.
At 13,000 square feet, the newest location is within a five-mile radius of a population of around 260,000 whose household income demographics hover around the $80,000-per-annum mark. It is surrounded by big-box retailers less than a mile away, and anchors the Loehmann’s Plaza shopping mall.
The store is more compact by half than the company’s largest, original store, in Succasunna, on Route 10. But the new size is to be the template for future Electronics Expos, according to Rich Yanitelli, the company’s vice president.
“We have a strong e-commerce site that’s driving customers into the stores,” Yanitelli states. “We no longer have many big-tube TVs we need to display, and iPods and MP3 players aren’t the same size as boomboxes. Everything we need to do fits pretty well into this design.”
The store features two flat-TV wall alcoves to the immediate right, with select audio systems mixed into the displays offering good-better-best combinations because “we don’t want people when they walk in to think we’re just a display company. We’re an audio company, and that’s how we want to present. Our aim is to sell video as an accessory to audio.”
Several offshoot rooms ring the store’s perimeter, and contain equipment mixes from simple A/V combination options to ultimate home theater configurations. One room is devoted to DLP and rear-LCD projection TVs and combinations of audio separates and home theaters in a box. Another is a front-projection room whose products are also coupled with good-better-best audio gear. A third room offers a full presentation of video with on-wall speakers and a few standalone speaker models. A fourth groups Samsung, Denon and Boston Acoustics gear together, while a fifth audio room -- smaller-scale than in earlier stores -- has separates and tower speakers.
This Electronics Expo location also houses the store’s signature “WOW” room, where start-to-finish home entertainment room construction packages are presented and offered to customers, even down to the buildout. “We’re licensed contractors in New Jersey,” explains Yanitelli. “We’re even the general contractors for ourselves. That’s why, three and a half weeks after we did all the knockdown of this building’s interior, we were set to open.”
