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A Wild & Marr vision

Thu, 02 Oct 2014 11:22

The Wild & Marr offices


Joe Copans’ vision of offering a complete audio solution is what drove him to direct Wild & Marr to where it is today…

The brains behind the success of audio turnkey solutions distributor Wild & Marr has always been that of managing director Joe Copans. Without his determination and vision to turn the company into what it is today, it would still be the consumer electronics components, spares and accessories distributor it was up until 1981, when Joe took over from his late father. “My vision was to market and build brands to offer solutions to customers,” he says.

The beginning

Wild & Marr was opened by two men – Mr Wild and Mr Marr – in the Johannesburg city centre in the 1940s, and Copans’ father, Morris, and Morris’s brother-in-law, purchased the business from the two original owners.

Until 1981, during Morris’s reign, the company’s core business was distributing consumer electronic components, spares and accessories. It was, however, becoming increasingly evident that to survive as a distributor, there was a desperate need for products that exhibited meaningful differentiation.

Joe Copans always had a love for music, and an interest in audio acoustics.

When word got out that the JBL distribution had become available, Wild & Marr were able to successfully negotiate the distribution of the JBL Professional Loudspeaker agency. Wild & Marr were officially appointed as the sub-sales and distributor of JBL in 1992.

In 1994, Wild & Marr acquired the Shure Microphone distribution.

The launching of the EON Loudspeakers seemed to indicate a turning point in the strategy which JBL took to market. EON was genuinely a product that evolved out of market demand. JBL is the flagship area of what has today become the Harman Pro division of Harman.

Harman Pro adopted a strategy of acquiring companies that were top quality manufacturers in all the various segments, such as processors, mixing consoles and amplifiers, these include DBX, BSS, Soundcraft, Lexicon and Crown.

In and around 2002, Harman adopted a strategy to integrate the distribution of all brands both in the US and worldwide. Wild & Marr was then fortunate to be appointed the sole sub-sales and distributor of all these brands.

Although Wild & Marr did not initially distribute the Studer brand, which is also a Harman Pro product, it was awarded this distribution some time later, and had in recent years been able to acquire meaningful market share in this area.

Between 1993 and 1996, Wild & Marr acquired the Harman range of products which included Soundcraft, dbx, BSS, Crown, and Lexicon.

Today

Wild & Marr is currently one of southern Africa’s renowned fore-runners, and a turnkey project solutions company in the distribution and installation of professional audio. The company is strategically planned to provide tailored professional audio solutions.

“Timeous, relevant, accurate input as well as excellent after sales service and repairs have cemented the company, and its focus of building and maintaining customer relationships, places Wild & Marr as a trusted brand,” says Copans. Apart from the Harman and Shure brands, Wild & Marr distributes a number of other peripheral solution products.

Wild & Marr specialises in custom audio engineering, audio / video integration, computer aided design, and acoustic analysis in the portable PA, contracting, and live events.

The company has also received a number of awards through the years; the most recent was the Shure Gold Plated Unidyne Microphone that was awarded in appreciation of 20 years of commitment and excellence. The Unidyne Microphone was the first directional microphone that used a single dynamic mic element and its iconic classic mic appearance has seen it being used by entertainers since its introduction in 1939.

Other recent awards have been Harman’s Presidents Award in 2011, which is the top award in the Harman group. In 2013 it won the Soundcraft Distributor of the Year award.

Biggest project


Wild & Marr’s single largest project to date was the Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban, which was constructed for the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The project began in 2008 and gained Wild & Marr an enormous amount of credibility, and was the first company to receive practical completion on site.

The stadium includes three amplifier rooms and two control rooms, and the kit list includes; 136 x JBL Vertec boxes; about 1 500 x JBL Control ceiling speakers; a number of JBL AM5212 speakers; about 70 x iTec 1 200 amplifiers; 65 x CTS Cobranet amplifiers; 18 x BSS Soundweb London processors; Soundcraft RM 100 for use in the control rooms; and the design was a complete Cobranet fully redundant signal path system, with 70 kilometres of cabling.

The people


Wild & Marr has a reputation of retaining staff for many years, and its longest serving employees (other than Copans himself!) are Jeff Isaacs who started in 1978 and the late ‘Uncle Blackie’, who spent 32 years at Wild & Marr developing his expertise and passing on his skills and knowledge to newcomers through the years.

Other employees that have been with the company for more than 10 years are: Darren Durbach, Farouk Moosa, Kas Naidoo, Aadil Matwadia, Hassen Karolia, Lisa Masia, Reggie Naidoo, Phillip Pela, Edson Nguyule, Gustav Teitge, Perlaine Parish, Neil Kasselman and Bonga Maluleka.

The future

“We are what we offer,” says Copans, adding that Wild & Marr have got some ‘nice things’ in the pipeline for the not too distant future. The technical expertise that Wild & Marr have in terms of its infrastructure offer turnkey solutions with high levels of consultancy, information and expertise, to find the absolute best possible solution for its customers. “Our future is directly dependent on us continuing to maintain and build our customer relationships and offering the best turnkey solutions.”

Service is a key quality going forward, continues Copans, and to keep growing and improving, based on the company’s idea that quality service is non-negotiable.

The Johannesburg office moved from the city centre to Kew in the 1980s, and has now been located in Isando on the East Rand for eight years. The service department opened in 1992 soon after Wild & Marr became a JBL distributor and now services all products offered by Wild & Marr.

The Cape Town branch of Wild & Marr opened in 2000 and now has a staff complement of 18. It has a sales department, qualified technicians that provide technical support, repairs and installations. The Durban branch opened in 2004 and has four employees that concentrate on sales and customer service solutions.

So, in answering the big question of what sets Wild & Marr apart from others, Copans says: “Our customer service, prestigious products, customer relationships, and technical expertise. Our winning spirit, collaborative efforts and successful partnerships drive us closer to our goal of establishing ourselves as the recognised extraordinary player in the southern African audio arena.”

So, in answering the big question of what sets Wild & Marr apart from others, Copans says: “Our customer service, prestigious products, customer relationships, and technical expertise. Our winning spirit, collaborative efforts and successful partnerships drive us closer to our goal of establishing ourselves as the recognised extraordinary player in the southern African audio arena.”




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