COVID, Politics, and a Hypnotic Blue Box: A Conversation with Win Cramer about Company Adaptability

Win Cramer is the CEO of JLab Audio, a leading personal audio company and one of the nation’s most highly-rated providers of accessible True Wireless headphones. After graduating from the University of Oklahoma’s Price College of Business, Mr. Cramer went on to work at EDGE Tech Corporation, a computer accessories company, and Avian, a Wall Street research firm, before coming to JLab in 2011. In 2019, for his work at JLab, he received the Entrepreneur of the Year award in the Technology and Services category in San Diego.

Bryan Wang (BT): You have a really interesting career path: you graduated from business school, worked for a computer accessories company (EDGE Tech Corporation) and then for a research firm in Wall Street (Avian). How did those experiences guide you toward a role in consumer electronics at JLab?

Win Cramer (WC): I don’t think I would be the CEO of JLab without all of those experiences. After business school, I joined a computer accessories company, and they were pretty small at the time, a ~20 million dollar business. That gave me an entrepreneurial type of company that lets you create your own path. I’ve never ever worked for a big fortune 500 type company, so I’ve never had red tape to deal with in my life. I’ve always been able to navigate the waters as I’ve seen fit and adjust the business and product accordingly, which has been very helpful as a CEO, to not think about red tape and think about growth. But when you layer on the Wall Street part of that, it gives you the background and the education from the P&L perspective that investors demand when you're asking them for money. Coming into the computer accessories world, I did not have that perspective. I knew how to read a P&L statement, but I wasn’t in them every single day of the week. As I transitioned to Wall Street, that became my full time job: understanding P&Ls and tech companies and what was what and who was who. Melding those things together led me to become the CEO of JLab. 

BT: Having worked at various companies and now leading JLab, is there anything you’ve experienced that college/business school didn’t prepare you for? 

WC: All of it. It didn’t prepare me for all of it. I say that somewhat jokingly, but real life is just different from what you can learn. We had a class at Oklahoma that took a full semester: You start a company from zero, invent and manufacture a product, and sell it to the student body or others. That class taught me about margin, sourcing, consumer behavior and what was important at the time to who we would be selling to. That has stuck with me to some extent because consumer behavior is constantly changing. As a leader of an organization, you need to be able to constantly evolve and pivot the business in favor of consumer behavior. I’ll give you an example from my world today: Three years ago, Apple airpods didn’t exist. Now it makes up 65% of the market. That’s what consumers demand: They expect to never have a wire again. So if we couldn’t quickly pivot the business to adjust to that consumer behavior, we’d be dead in the water. I think some of our competitors, someone that's just focused on sound quality, has really struggled in some of this transition because they haven’t learned how to pivot and that’s been key. If there’s one lesson from business school I could take it’d be that. 

BT: I think that flexibility—that pivoting you mentioned—is really helpful for our current situation of COVID. I was wondering what was the biggest problem you had to confront with the pandemic?

WC: So it was two fronts for us: all of our products come from China, so when the pandemic started, it started in China, really over Chinese New Year. When factories were supposed to come back online, they couldn’t, because they were closed down due to COVID. And when our factories couldn’t come online, we had to really begin rationing what inventory we had to our partners which was very challenging. You’re effectively telling your customers: I’m sorry, I can’t ship to you. I’d love to take your money, but I can’t, thank you. Now when supply started to turn online, then we had our own crisis here in America. And then it became a demand-side issue, or so we thought. When the pandemic hit and we all transitioned overnight to working from home, my thought was that demand was going to go to the floor. What’s going to happen? Did we order too much inventory? And the reality was actually quite opposite. Demand went through the roof because people were stuck at home and needed a way to communicate to their employees or to their school mates or just with their friends, and headphones became a key component to helping them communicate. And with that our demand shot up. So we were able to pivot quickly and order more. Certainly two sides of it were first supply which we managed through, and then demand which we thought would fall and then shot up. 

BT: I’ve read a lot of impressive figures about JLab’s growth: From 2015-2017, the company’s revenue grew by 256%. What do you think was the most important decision or event that caused JLab to grow so quickly?

WC: This is gonna sound kind of cheesy: so our partners that we sell to today are generally brick and retail. The Walmarts, Targets and Best Buys of the world can really help your brand and quickly move the needle. So I was looking at our retail shelves and all the competitors one day and noticed everyone’s boxes on the shelf were white—so they were trying to mimic Apple—or they were black because they were trying to copy Bose or Beats. At the same time, I happened to be reading Phil Knight's book called Shoe Dog. He tells this story in the book where he wanted customers to recognize that they just walked out of his Santa Monica store with his products so he made his boxes orange so they would be very visible. I read that and thought "oh my gosh, we need to go with a unique colored box different from what everyone else was doing. The next day I came into the office and said print everything we have in blue boxes and I want to see what it looks like. I drove over to our local Target and took all our boxes on the shelf and looked at it, and the blue box was so vibrant and visible to the point that a customer walked by in front of me, grabbed a product off the shelf, and kept walking and I had to go get him and tell him there's nothing even in the box. They just saw it and grabbed it and liked it. The blue box is just so vibrant that it captivates you. And when you get captivated, you go look at it. And once you look at it, you read that the features and benefits of the products are superior to those that are 2, 3,4x the price. That is what helped us grow this business.

BT: Before coming to JLab, did you prefer to use a different brand of headphones? And how have your experiences with those brands influenced your vision for JLab’s headphones?

WC: Yes, before I came to JLab, I used the Apple headphones that were in the box. I think that's kind of what everybody did. They didn't know there was this world outside of Apple in terms of earbuds. The second I put in a pair of JLab headphones, the sound was spectacular and it blew me away that I could actually have bass and hear vocals out of a tiny little earbud and I never experienced that before. What was wrong with JLab was that they weren't wireless and they didn't feel very good. They sounded great but the comfort wasn't there. And comfort is very important with personal audio products. No matter how cool they look, if they're not comfortable, it doesn't matter: people are going to take them off. So we made this product evolution change when I came on board that a) let's make everything wireless, and b) we focus on comfort first. If the customer has a comfortable experience, we think they'll come back to us again to buy our product. 

BT: As someone who has testified twice before Congress over tariff policies, it seems like you care a lot about our nation’s trade laws. In light of President Trump’s new tariffs earlier this year, how has this policy impacted JLab?

WC: Clearly financially: When you get with a tariff that's a straight hit to your bottom line. It's a tax you couldn't forecast, you couldn't plan for, and you can't pass on to the consumer. We felt attacked to some extent by our own country because we were growing the business the right way and hiring people in America and this tax was put on this business. Once we got through the financial side of things, it really became a time suck and a void. I've never testified before Congress before, but to do that, it takes practice and patience and time commitment to understand what you're going to talk about. Those weeks of preparation I could have been focused on growing the business instead of preparing to speak to Congress. This void in time that we were unfortunately forced to go down just created less opportunity for growth.

BT: Going off from that—I don’t want to leave out the elephant in the room: How will this upcoming election on Tuesday affect JLab in the future?

WC: I wish I could give a clear answer. I think if Biden wins tariffs eventually go away, but corporate tax rates go up, so net (if Biden wins) it's probably a push. But I would love to have a great relationship with China. I've spent 20 years going to China, and I have friends who I refer to as family over there, and this conflict is unfortunate and hasn't been addressed the right way. I think there are different ways to go about it, and I'd like to see the two countries work together in a more meaningful way.

BT: Many students today feel as though they’re trapped by an overwhelming load of work and an enormous pressure to succeed. Do you have any advice for students today? And have you ever felt similarly toward your position as CEO of JLab? If so, what motivates you to keep working?

WC: I'll start with the last question first: what motivates me is that I hate to lose. I'm just super competitive by nature. I don't have to win, but I hate losing. For me that's what continues my motivation: I'm not going to let us lose. But going back to your first question of advice: go travel for a year. I mean, you're never going to have this opportunity again. When I graduated high school and was on my way to college, my mom offered me a ski pass to ski for a year, and I politely declined saying, "no i want to go to school." And that was one of the biggest regrets of my life: I could have taken a free year to go and just ski and learn things. Real life teaches you a lot. Real travel teaches you a lot. Different perspective teaches you a lot. There are absolutely avenues to learn and to better yourself that are outside the educational system and outside the work foundation. And when you're ready to join the workforce with the knowledge and experience you gained from the real world: it'd be quite impressive.