Teufel attacks hi-fi market with new UK website

Teufel has launched a UK-specific retail website for the first time.

The German hi-fi company's unique selling point is that, like Dell in the computing market, its products are only available direct from its website.

But until now, there was one centralised website for all European markets.

This has now changed, as Teufel has launched a UK specific website which has all prices in lovely pounds sterling as well as offering other UK-centric features.

Teufel says that by cutting out the middlemen in the retail sector and buying direct, you could save up to 60 per cent compared to buying big-brand hi-fi products from traditional retailers.

"With Teufel you get better quality at the same price," Teufel's Florian Szigat told TechRadar.

"We have the best price-to-quality ratio and this is the crucial point. Customers get good service and native language support and they get the chance to listen to the speakers in their home where they're meant to be played and if they keep them they get a 12-year warranty on any speaker.

"We get a lot of requests from German and international companies saying 'we like your products and we'd like to sell them in our stores' and we ask them 'what margin would you want?' and they say 30 per cent, 40 per cent, 60 per cent, and we say we can't do this because our margins are not that high.

"Our high end speakers would cost maybe twice the price through a traditional retailer."

Because Teufel aren't stocked in any stores, it allows customers an eight-week home trial in order to evaluate the products.

"We cut out the middle man by selling directly and this saves for the customer the margin that the middle man would take," said Szigat, "we either take this saving and pass it on to the customer to offer them the product at a far better rate or we take it, put it into development and offer them a far better product at the same rate.

"This is the advantage. The obvious disadvantage is that we're not to be found in the stores so you cannot touch the product yourself or listen to it before you buy it. And this is what we try to cope with by granting all customers an eight week right of return.

"You are granted two weeks anyway by law but we grant them an extra six weeks to set the product up at home where it's going to be used, which might have a heavy effect on how it sounds compared to how it would sound in the store, and at any time in the eight weeks customers can pack it up again, call us and we'll collect the product and give you your money back."