
Wireless Speakers
The Hammacher Schlemmer Indoor / Outdoor Wireless Speakers work with almost any audio source and are rugged enough to be left outside overnight during a storm and used the next day to play your music with amazingly high quality.
The Hammacher Schlemmer Indoor / Outdoor Wireless Speakers work with almost any audio source and are rugged enough to be left outside overnight during a storm and used the next day to play your music with amazingly high quality.
Back in 2005 the catalog company Hammacher Schlemmer partnered with Marche to develop a set of outdoor / go anywhere wireless speakers. Hammacher Schlemmer, through their analytics department, had realized that there were very few options for outdoor wireless speakers.
Because Hammacher Schlemmer is a high end catalog company with high end products, Marche was afforded the luxury of designing and engineering for a relatively high price point. This meant high quality components and materials, but also higher customer expectations.
This image shows the product in black and gray, a popular option for our online sales.
Our designers provided a number of concepts for this project. A key goal for our designers was to make the speakers very portable while making the handle that integrated cohesively with the design.
The portability of the final design was a hit with both stakeholders and customers. While the quality of the speaker components caused a bit of heft, the feel of the product in tow gives the perception of quality as well as comfort.
Another key was styling. These speakers would most likely be used in social situations, often on the owners boat, dock, deck or other property. In these situations it’s important that the product be an extension of the users personal style.
Without being too ‘flashy’ the final design solution offers a unique aesthetic. The contrast between the textured grill and the ultra polished main housing creates an eloquent parting line while the soft rubber bright orange handle grip gives a nice focal point.
This project provided plenty of challenges for ours engineers as well:
The most notable feat our engineers accomplished while creating the plastic injection tooling was creating the main housing, whose surface was completely polished. It is very common for large plastic parts to be textured. This is because textured finish will hide or mask imperfections in the tooling. When you choose to create a polished surface, all imperfections are magnified. The main housing not only looks sharp with its polished finished, it also highlights the quality of our tooling as it shows almost no imperfections.