La Boîte Concept, a lesson in high-fidelity business

“Don’t go down that path, the golden years are long gone”, she exclaimed. Timothée’s gran is no other than Marie Cagniard Yeramian, the lady behind one of France’s biggest loudspeaker firms… founded in 1938. The matriarch of the family. Having been born in Constantinople (now known as Istanbul) she moved to France at the age of 14, initially working as a radio parts operator before carving a path as one of France’s acoustics industry pioneers. In the 1970s and 80s it was along with her son, Thierry Cagniard, that she propelled the family firm, SIARE, to the pinnacle of innovation in the world of high-fidelity speakers. The golden years to which Marie was referring were a time when the electronic goods everyone wanted were televisions and large-speakered hi-fis, which both took pride of place in the living room. But the passion for that perfect round sound seemed to have waned by the time the XXIst century dawned. First of all there was the arrival of the cute and compact mini-hi-fi, inseparable from the CD player, followed by the explosion of digital music played initially through computers, and then streamed via tablets and smartphones. High-fidelity sound, whose bandwidth reproduces the entire acoustic spectrum from very high to very low, wasn’t in tune with the demands of the digital age. In the end, SIARE was sold off.

“When I was very young, I made my own custom speakers in my parents’ cellar. I had access to loads of SIARE loudspeakers to inspire me”

 

But Timothée and his brother Guillaume refused to simply turn the page. The family saga was destined to be continued by the third generation. “When I was very young, I made my own custom speakers in my parents’ cellar. I had access to loads of SIARE loudspeakers to inspire me”, Timothée recalls. Helped by his father, Thierry, he built up his technical skills, learning to calculate each speaker’s theoretical size (in litres), draw up a design whose shape would produce good acoustics, cut the wood, weld the wires, carry out tests, make adjustments… “to achieve the most perfect sound possible”. When everyone else was holidaying on the beach, Timothée spent his summers with his gran, talking entrepreneurship and hi-fis. “She taught me how to negotiate and how to get a good price when buying things from the market, told me about her business adventures, bought me La Revue du son magazine to teach me the technical side of things”.

It was consequently as a family, grandmother, father and son, that the Cagniards embarked on their brand new project. “We started thinking about how we could bridge the gap between modern-day media and hi-fis. The Ipod docks that were being launched on the market produced poor quality sound, but had the advantage of being a plug-and-play solution. We started to look for a way of producing a high quality sound that was also easily accessible.” In 2008, they took the crucial step of setting up a research and development laboratory, CC LAB, and set about registering their first patents. These included one for Wide Sound technology, which is constantly being improved and allows an “immersive and powerful” wide stereo sound to be produced from a digital track. Their first design was an all-in-one computer with speakers, integrated into a wooden structure that resembled an arcade game. Their next creation was what was to become their trademark piece: an elegant sound station with an integrated amplifier and speakers, onto which the laptop could simply be docked (the LD concept, standing for “Laptop Dock”). La Boîte Concept was born. Their creation instantly attracted attention. “It was at that point that we made a beeline for the MAISON&OBJET trade fair to get our product out into the market. We said to ourselves: where do people who want this kind of product go? To furniture stores! The product’s success exceeded all our expectations – people were queueing at our stand. Since then, we’ve grown with MAISON&OBJET.” Time has proved the young entrepreneurs right. Perfect sound has become the ultimate luxury. And they can now also ride the wave of the made-in-France phenomenon, as both the research laboratory and manufacturing site are located in the Basque Country. Vinyl records have also since made a massive comeback. Their high-fidelity bet… on the family business has ended up paying off.

By Caroline Tossan