The recently rebranded Snap One has made a $2.3 million investment into opening a Charlotte-based Quality and Innovation Lab.
Robert Riggsby, vice president of quality, said the multimillion-dollar investment and work on the lab began last year, but Covid-19 slowed its implementation. The lab opened this spring and is located at Snap One's headquarters location in southwest Charlotte.
"To us, the quality aspect is a never-ending journey. We’ll always be focused on improving," he said. "Covid got in the middle of it and actually helped in some ways to allow us to focus on some big, exciting things in the lab. It took a little bit longer than planned, but it wrapped up in the spring and turned out fantastic."
David Moore, executive vice president of technology and engineering, said the lab will allow Snap One to scale and continue to support the "tidal wave" of smart devices homeowners are integrating into their lives.
"A lot of what we do requires very deep testing ... Over the last two-to-three years, as we've brought more products in, our need to test has grown," he said. "We've continued to make improvements and equip ourselves to handle that new capacity."
Snap One, which announced its name change from SnapAV last week, also made its preliminary filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering, according to a story from the Charlotte Business Journal. The filing says the company intends to trade on the NASDAQ Global Market under the symbol “SNPO.”
CEO John Heyman said in a statement that the former name no longer represented the company as a whole or its future aspirations.
“We kept the name ‘Snap’ because of our ongoing mission to make our partners’ lives easier," he said. "We want to be the one place with the broadest portfolio of best-in-class products; the one shopping experience that can be done online or in-store; and the one partner that professionals can depend on when installing and supporting the amazing experiences that their customers desire.”
SnapAV was founded in 2005 and originally focused on home and office audio-visual equipment, Moore said. Now the company develops and manufactures A/V, security, control, networking and remote management products for professional integrators of home and office technology.
"We manufacture smart home technology. So, imagine an operating system like you have on your computer that sits inside your house, and that operating system allows all the smart devices in your home to work seamlessly and create great end-customer experiences," Moore told Inno. "We build these products in-house, but we also write really deep integration to these third-party devices you might find at Best Buy or online so that an end-customer can live with a complete smart home."
