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With $20 million a year in electronics sales and a legendary knack for marketing, you’d think the managers at Stereo Advantage would have no trouble luring vendor reps into town to strike a deal. Except the town, despite being one of the 50 most populated U.S. metro regions, is Buffalo. Maybe it’s the city’s reputation as a struggling post-industrial metropolis. Maybe it’s the weather. Whatever it is, Stereo Advantage CEO Al Walters still has to talk out-of-towners into the merits of his market.
“Vendors say to me, ‘What am I going to do in Buffalo?’ And I tell them, ‘You’re going to have a really good time!’”
It’s a promise, as manufacturers of nine different lines of HDTVs have discovered, that Walters, who still goes by his old nickname Audio Al, can keep.
The Stereo Advantage store as well as its staff are designed with the intent to present the shopping experience and product lines, as easy-going grown-up sources of pleasure. “I think of it as selling adult toys,” laughed long-time salesman and system-designer Tom Fitzpatrick. “You know what I mean.”
You can tell just by approaching the Stereo Advantage operation on Main Street, Williamsville, this won’t be an average electronics retail experience. First of all, the place looks remarkably like a coffee bar from the outside, with an outdoor cafe area and a round logo that’s more than a little reminiscent of a Starbucks sign. It’s not a misleading message. As soon as you enter the store, you encounter a full café serving Starbucks coffee drinks and pastries. Chocolate-leather seats are grouped in front of a generous fireplace (helping to take the edge off Buffalo winters) and a long bar with comfortable stools awaits anyone looking for WiFi. There is no sign of a TV wall or generic accessories aisles. There’s another surprise at the café too: booze. Stereo Advantage founder Tony Walker, who has built something of a retail empire in Buffalo that extends beyond electronics to fashion, jewelry and high-end spa products, came up with the idea to serve beer and wine in the store a couple years back, which puzzled some of his employees at first.
“I was like, are you kidding me?” Fitzpatrick said. “All I could picture was people spilling coffee on the TVs. Liquid and electronics don’t mix! But now I get it, it’s actually really great. Look, people come in here and spend $5,000 to $7,000 bucks. That’s a lot of money for people in Buffalo. Everything’s going up except people’s salaries. But we’re working hard here and we’re staying afloat in this thing. We’ve got a chance every time people come in. You keep ‘em in here until they want to leave, until they can’t take it anymore, you showed them so much cool, and you got them something to drink. It’s all service.”
