When aspiring stars and hobbyists alike started launching home recording studios built on microphones plugged into Macs, the growth trajectory of Blue Microphones began to mirror the name of its popular product: the Snowball.
In 1995, when the company’s founders started to design and build professional grade recording equipment, they didn’t plan to target the consumer market. But the ability to pivot when opportunity presents itself is key to all successful growth stories.
The story behind Blue Microphones
An Apple engineer approached Blue Microphones’ founders, American jazz musician Skipper Wise and Latvian recording engineer Martins Saulespurens, with an early copy of its Garage Band software. The team quickly recognized the opportunity to bring professional-grade sound to creative performers everywhere and started to work on something that would alter the planned journey of the Westlake Village, Calif.-based manufacturer.
As Blue Microphones continued to ramp up production and sale of lower-cost microphones, the company was mindful of maintaining quality. Whether it was a $4,000 “Bottle” microphone clutched by Imagine Dragons’ front man Dan Reynolds as he sang “Radioactive” to thousands of fans, or a $49.99 “Snowball” plugged into a home laptop by a singer cutting a demo, maintaining quality and consistency were primary concerns.
Soon Blue mics were adopted by podcasters, YouTubers, game streamers and folks on Skype all over the world. As the business grew and profits increased, managing all those transactions and tracking the business put strain on the existing financial system.
Systems can’t scale at speed
“We needed to be fully integrated, with regards to EDI, with regards to ERP, with regards to warehousing,” said Bart Thielen, CFO and COO of Blue Microphones. “We were on a system that just couldn’t handle us.”
The key to business growth and success is greater transaction volumes and speed, but it’s hard for many financial systems to handle this kind of pressure. Achieving full audit trails, rich business planning and reporting, or automated processes requires adding systems and constantly engineering short-term quick fixes.
And for businesses like Blue Microphones, using several systems to manage different processes is time-consuming and sometimes nearly impossible to integrate information from across all of them to gain efficiencies in operations.
NetSuite enables new initiatives that spur growth
For Blue Microphones, NetSuite removed the friction associated with manual, cumbersome inventory, ecommerce and accounting processes and empowered the business to implement key initiatives.
Blue Microphones was able to launch full product serialization to more quickly pinpoint and remedy quality issues as it scaled production. It has end-to-end visibility of financials, inventory, order and warehouse management, CRM and HR, and the ability to easily conduct multi-currency transactions. With cloud-based software it has shed infrastructure costs, as well as resources associated with managing on-premise systems– saving two FTEs annually.
See Blue Microphones SuiteWorld18
Blue Microphones will be behind much of the media coverage from SuiteWorld18. The Blue Microphones Center on the expo floor will host press, analysts and customers from across the globe where they will be recording podcasts sharing insight and advice on managing growth using the company’s signature microphones.
SuiteWorld18 will be held at the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, April 23-26, 2018. For more information, visit www.netsuitesuiteworld.com and follow @NetSuite on Twitter for live updates.