Building a business that depends on the products of another company is risky for starters, and then if you look at the margins that people often get for “accessories” for products, that’s not always a great business story either.
The story of SDI Technologies, formerly Realtone electronics, is a great story, and it’s well told in this article by Eric A. Taub in the paper today.
Back then, Realtone made radios when they were a really big deal and they make a lot of the clock radios that are in hotel rooms. Today as SDI, the kids of the founders of the company run it, and they have successfully turned the company back into a booming business by attaching themselves to Apple products. They have a line of iHome products that are docks for iPhones, iPods, and iPads, which do some pretty cool things that are described in Taub’s article.
What’s the big takeaway from the success of SDI?
Pretty simple, -when a company has a runaway success story as Apple has in recent years, think about what you could make to compliment it in an already established industry. The hotel clock radio has been a bad experience for the last 20 years for some really simple reasons, and SDI fixed all of them with these new docks, mostly leveraging Apple technology.
Really great to see.
And Now I know that there are 4.9 million hotel rooms in the US, I don’t know what I would have guessed if someone had asked me, but I guess that means that about 1 in every 100 people is in a hotel room every night, and I guess that makes sense.
-Ric
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