A tiny booth stood about three football fields from the entrance to the south hall of last week’s International Consumer Electronics Show.
It was far from the glamorous exhibits put on by top electronics companies like Samsung, South Korea’s LG Electronics and Panasonic, where booths could handle as many as 5,000 visitors at one time.
Not so the 10-foot-by-10-foot space fronted by Dan and Nada Zubic, husband and wife and sole proprietors of Aurora-based start-up Ovideon Inc.
The Zubics came to CES with three LCD flat-panel television monitors–the first and only monitors the company has manufactured–looking to get noticed.
“CES is the first time anybody is hearing about Ovideon,” said Dan Zubic, who printed Ovideon’s first batch of business cards at home just days before the show. “This is an introduction to our company for the industry.”
More Top Picks Best Gifts For Runners
It’s not easy to get noticed at a show like CES. Ovideon’s 100-square-foot booth–the smallest amount of space a company can lease–is easily lost at a show with 2,300 other exhibitors and more than 3 million square feet of exhibit space.
Ovideon is competing in a segment suddenly crawling with competition. Samsung, for instance, brought more than 100 flat-panel displays to adorn its booth, while LG showed off a 76-inch model.
Other new flat-panel players include Schaumburg’s Motorola Inc., Dell Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and even Polaroid. And don’t forget existing consumer electronics giants such as Sony Corp. and Philips.
“There’s a lot of room for a lot of players in this industry,” said John Taylor, vice president for corporate communications for LG Electronics USA. “If he [Zubic] can come up with a unique value proposition for people, he’ll be hugely successful.”
Indeed, the manufacturers’ sales of LCD flat-panel televisions grew from $246 million in 2002 to an estimated $651 million last year, according to the Arlington, Va.-based Consumer Electronics Association. The trade group projects LCD television sales will grow an additional 64 percent in 2004.
Sales for flat-screen TVs with plasma displays–a more mature market–are also rising rapidly. In 2002, sales of plasma TVs reached $515 million. Last year, the CEA estimates, that figure tripled, to $1.5 billion. In 2004, the trade group estimates that sales for plasma displays will reach $2.2 billion.
“But this is not an easy market to enter,” Zubic said. “You need to know people and you need to know what you’re doing. You can’t just go make displays on a whim.”
Zubic, born in Yugoslavia, worked for 10 years as a manager in the television division for NEC USA until he was laid off in April.
In May, and after “clearing my head for a month,” the Zubics decided to make their own TVs.
Using the relationships he developed at NEC, Zubic traveled to Taiwan to select a contract electronics manufacturer to produce flat-screen TVs under the Ovideon brand.
Zubic’s manufacturing strategy is similar to those of computer companies Dell and H-P: Let a third party make the TVs. Both LCD and plasma flat-screen TVs can be built from parts assembled today by low-cost Asian manufacturers–much like personal computers.
Ovideon’s first three flat-panel TVs–in 20-, 27- and 30-inch sizes–arrived about two weeks before CES. Media kits were created and burned onto CD-ROMs by the Zubics’ three children–and the company Web site debuted the day before the show.
“His success depends on how big a tree he’s trying to climb,” said Richard Doherty, research director at Seaford, N.Y.-based Envisioneering Group, a consumer electronics market research company. “If you have good connections in the hotel industry, for example, one person can sell tens of millions of dollars” worth of flat-panel screens for hotel rooms.
Still, Doherty said, retailers might hesitate before selling products from an unproven start-up in an industry as volatile as consumer electronics.
The nation’s largest consumer electronics retailer would not rule out a company based on size.
“If [the company] would be providing products that we think would help our customers, we would certainly look into it,” said a spokeswoman for Minneapolis-based Best Buy Co. “But in this economy, it’s always a little bit more difficult to get in front of [Best Buy] because you have to make your products and services known.”
Which is why the Zubics had a booth at this year’s CES.
Ovideon’s three monitors–which are priced between $1,800 and $4,000–boasted displays that were among the brightest and crispest at the show. “A lot of people came to us and said we have the best displays,” Zubic said.
Zubic collected what he considered to be 125 qualified leads at the four-day show.
That included a request by food giant General Mills Inc. to price about 500 flat-panel units for purchase, and California-based Faroudja Laboratories Inc., which develops high-end home theater systems, asked if it could buy only the flat-panel screens–not the whole TVs.
“The answer is always yes,” Zubic said. “I figure out how later.”
After spending $9,000 for travel expenses and the floor space to show off an untested product, Zubic said the opportunity was what he hoped for.
More Top Picks Best In Ceiling Speakers For Whole Home Audio
“If I had to think about it again, I would make the same decision,” he said. “This was the scariest thing in the world for me to do–this booth was a lot of money for us.”
Then he added that Ovideon has already reserved a booth at next year’s show–one that is twice the size.