First on stage after Morten Elk’s keynote opening at Nordic Growth Hackers #12 was Tommy Andersen talking about the Libratone success. Basically, they went to Apple in 2010 with nothing but a handful of renderings of a completely new product, the Libratone speaker.
They eventually landed a collaboration with Apple because the Libratone guys had experience in how to navigate all the interests in a big corporation like Apple. An “ambassador” in a venture fund helped get access to the right people inside Apple.
Another key element was that Libratone’s brand and values were quite close to Apple’s—a simple, modern white design (almost all hi-fi systems were black back then), and focus on the experience rather than the technology. And they delivered a product that fit extremely well into the whole Apple ecosystem. Also, they could piggyback a megatrend, the iPhone, which had been launched just a few years earlier and really changed a lot in how people consumed music.