How Facebook has been instrumental in growing Flare Audio's sales

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

A love of music was the catalyst for Davies Roberts to close one successful business and open another. He spent five years leasing professional audio systems to bands and festivals across the UK, but was disappointed by the quality of sound that some produced. “The PA systems made the concerts sound so muffled,” he explains.

Inspired to solve this problem, Roberts, who left school without any qualifications, founded Flare Audio in 2010 in a small warehouse next to a scrap yard in Lancing, West Sussex “to make better quality sound”. The company’s impressive product line of loudspeakers and earphones is centred on the principle of waveform integrity, to ensure linearity and accuracy in sound reproduction.

Ingeniously, this is enabled by what Flare Audio CEO Roberts calls the company’s “space technology” which stops the vibrations in audio equipment that cause resonance or a distorted sound.

Flare Audio grew year-on-year sales by 300 per cent to £5.9 million last year, has raised £2.2 million via crowdfunding and has also expanded its workforce from three to nearly 30 employees since 2010. The company has received plaudits from music industry leaders, including producer Tony Visconti and The Rolling Stones’ producer Chris Kimsey.

It’s not always been plain sailing, however. Flare Audio faced plenty of challenges when it started out by selling its wares wholesale to retailers. “They told us that if they brought us into their stores it would destroy their existing product line,” Roberts recalls.

“When you come up with something really new, people either don’t believe it or they don’t want to touch it.”

Undeterred, he pivoted sales directly to consumers via e-commerce on the Flare Audio website. Facebook has been instrumental in growing sales — three quarters of which now come from the social media network.

“We needed to create awareness and get people talking about our products before going into shops,” Roberts says. “Facebook has been great at getting products in front of the people who are most likely to buy them. Facebook is fundamentally important to our growth.”

Roberts says his biggest future challenge is looking at ways to get plastic out of the products, as reduced packaging and increased recyclability are becoming increasingly important issues for consumers. “There’s far too much plastic in the world and I view it as a major environmental and health risk,” he says.

Flare Audio’s chief executive advises entrepreneurs to focus on finding solutions to problems.

“The best companies are those which found an issue and addressed it,” he says, adding that founders shouldn’t be afraid of failure: “It’s a chance to learn.”

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