Crescendo Designs Celebrates 10 Years In Business

Like something out of a James Bond movie, Mike Brody taps a small screen with his finger and a television emerges from behind a painting. With another light tap, blinds roll back gracefully across a large window. Showing off Crescendo Designs’s 2,500-square-foot “Experience Center” last Friday, Mr. Brody, 39, and his brother, Chris Brody, 35, said they are celebrating 10 years of designing and selling seamless, state-of-the-art audiovisual systems. The brothers said that while their products make things look easy, it has been hard work around the clock that has gotten them to a decade of service.

Mike Brody, a resident of East Moriches, coolly presses nearly-hidden buttons on control panels and taps away on small screens, flush with the walls, throughout the center, bringing the mock-home to life with lights and sound. Crescendo Designs, located on County Road 39, sells and installs home automation systems and luxury technologies that would make any home fit for a British spy.

“We’re catering to a specialized clientele,” Mr. Brody said, flipping through a list of movies on the 130-inch screen in the home theater room, adding that much of Crescendo Designs’s customers live in Manhattan and some also have homes in the Hamptons. “People don’t want things to stand out. The light controls and speakers all blend in. It’s not bulky and you don’t know it’s there. We want a very sexy look to the products we install.”

Perhaps one of the more impressive products at the Experience Center is a flat-screen television that slides out and up from beneath a bed. For some, a single remote that controls the entire home’s heating and air system, lights, security, entertainment system and environment is a thing of dreams, but the Brody brothers and their staff of more than 20 have made it possible for many.

“We’re responsible for making this whole thing work, from the components to the design, to writing the logic for the system,” Mike Brody said of his automated products. “Ten years ago, it wasn’t this good.”

Back in 2002, when plasma TVs were the hottest technology on the market, the brothers started their company in Chris Brody’s garage. Chris Brody had started an online retail business selling audiovisual products like car audio systems and TVs, which then quickly transformed into a home installation business as the online market grew.

Realizing the potential growth of the business, the brothers determined that they needed a bricks-and-mortar office, so they opened a new store on Hill Street under the name Crescendo Designs.

“Every company that does what we do is called ‘audiovisual this’ and ‘audiovisual that,’” Mike Brody said. “We wanted to be different—we are different. Crescendo means the growing toward the apex.”

In their early 20s, the brothers faced some difficulty with major companies who didn’t take them seriously because of their ages, and sometimes they barely made enough to get by.

“In the years when we first started, we would get some good jobs, then no jobs, and there were weeks and months where we didn’t pay ourselves and paid our employees,” Mr. Brody said.

Nonetheless, they persevered and opened a second location on Main Street to serve as a warehouse and operation center. As the business grew, they decided to relocate to one space to have it all under one roof and create the Experience Center, where visitors can touch, see and feel the technology before they buy it.

Mr. Brody said that maintaining the business has required keeping a constant eye on the next big thing and working around the clock.

“Running your own business is like having kids—it’s a family in itself. You give everything you have for your family and for your kids and don’t take a lot of it yourself,” he added. “But now we’re not working seven days, we’re working six days.”

Over the years, he said that it has been a challenge to be at the forefront of technology in a market that changes every six months. “You can never look back in this industry,” he said. “The second I take the back seat, I’m done.”

The market is so competitive, he said, that the business has to constantly evolve. Over the past 10 years, the introduction of the iPod and iPad has changed the industry the most. Touchpads have become the new normal and portable media has become a necessity.

Looking at what the next 10 years has in store for them, Mr. Brody said it is most important that Crescendo Designs becomes better at what it does. He wants perfection.

“This is James Bond-type stuff,” he said. “We’re shooting for things that are sometimes unreachable.”