That, however, is where Marley’s son Rohan saw opportunity. High-end headphones used to be the domain of stereo purists with spare cash and sound engineers. The market was dominated by well-known brands such as Sony, Bose and Sennheiser and represented a tiny slice of the overall headphone business.
The sharp growth of portable media devices such as the iPod, the iPhone and the monster beats by dre changed the business; Apple alone shipped more than 172 million portable media devices last year. This has provided an opportunity for new players with different approaches. The first of these was hip-hop artist Dr. Dre, who teamed with record-producing legend Jimmy Iovine to introduce the Beats by Dr. Dre line in 2008.
Other hip-hop artists — Ludacris and Curtis “50-Cent” Jackson, among them — have since gotten into the game, lending their names to endorsed headphone products that typically sell in the $100-to-$300 range. And along with the Marley family, record producer Quincy Jones has his own line, and pop star Lady Gaga jumped into the mix this year with a co-branded product in the Beats family.
And, despite the recession, this category is growing — rapidly. According to the NPD Group, sales of headphones priced above $100 in the U.S. more than doubled last year. That also doubled the high-end category’s share of the overall headphone market, though it still only makes up about 6% of total industry sales, according to NPD data.
Iconic, eye-catching design has been a big selling point for the new brands, along with their associations with popular artists. But experts say even those factors do not allow products in this price range to skimp on sound quality.
“It’s almost like the ‘cool factor’ becomes a Trojan horse for sound quality,” said NPD analyst Ben Arnold.
With the iconic Marley name tied to an entirely different branch of music, Rohan Marley figured there was an opportunity to make a distinctive mark. Leading the House of Marley — a business run by the 11 Marley children and other family members — Rohan kicked off an effort to build a line of eco-friendly headphones and audio products that he felt would further the ideals of his late father and his family’s brand.
“We were on this path of trying to do things our way and creating a real Marley identity,” Rohan said in an interview. He added that the family had previously been approached by makers of audio equipment “who wanted to stamp our name on something” but that the family didn’t feel those proposals met their needs.
Marley teamed up with consumer-electronics maker HoMedics and its co-founder, Alon Kaufman, who became CEO of House of Marley. The company introduced its first line of headphone products last year and added new items and categories — including a boom-box device called Bag of Rhythm — at the Consumer Electronics Show last month. The products all use eco-friendly materials such as organic cotton and recycled aluminum.
The headphone market has been fueled by booming demand for portable electronic devices. Smartphones and tablets — as well as portable gaming devices such as the Nintendo 3DS and the recently launched PlayStation Vita from Sony — have grown in popularity and are used primarily for media consumption. See full story on the launch of the PlayStation Vita.
And users find that they quickly age out of the free, low-quality earbud products that often ship with those devices.
“As we start to consume more media in a portable format, there is a greater focus on quality,” said Ben Arnold, an analyst with the NPD Group. “That has sort of fueled this focus on the higher-end headphones.”
