Anthony Gallo - Heritage
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In 1993 when Anthony had sold off the last of his possessions, Gary Pelled came along. Gary was a lighting engineer specializing in energy conservation via efficient lighting and design. He was working with the owner of a small facility in the Bronx. While discussing mutual hobbies with him, Gary mentioned that he liked audio equipment. The owner said "Oh, you should go say hello to this guy in the back, he is renting some space from me and he builds speakers". Gary went to the back of the shop where he met Anthony for the first time. Anthony had the satellite portion of the old wooden Nucleus system hooked up and Gary was immediately awed by the sound. "I wanted to buy a pair and told Anthony that when he was ready, I wanted one for a discount price. I knew right away that Anthony and I would become friends. We had the same hobbies and interests while growing up and most of all , we both were entrepreneurs and honest hardworking guys". As the months passed, Gary would call Anthony and offer him business and marketing advice when he called to see when his speakers would be ready. It became apparent one day that Anthony had run out of money to continue his research and bring the Nucleus to market. He told Gary that he had considered placing an advertisement looking for an investor. "I asked Anthony why he did not ask me to invest. He told me he that since I had my own business, he didn't think I would be interested. I decided at that very moment that I would invest in this technology and devote half of my time to forming a speaker company with Anthony". Gary eventually had to give up his original business as Gallo Acoustics took over all of his time. As Gary tells it, the progression of events is best summarized as follows: "We began by working together literally at the living room table. We listened to the behemoth Nucleus, which looked sort of like a Watt Puppy on steroids, and dreamed about ways to deliver what we were hearing to the world. It was around that time that we hit on the spherical concept. You know, you always hear stories about companies that start out in a garage or a basement. For us, it was a big deal when we were able to rent out the basement of Anthony's brownstone in Brooklyn/NY and just get out of the living room! We moved into the basement. Mind you, that was a 100+ year old building and the dust down there was deep enough to ski on. There was also an old coal shoot which we liked and a boiler that broiled us all summer and put out enough fumes to do permanent damage all winter. This is one of those basements that have the hinged steel doors on the sidewalk. You had to open them up and climb down these steep mouldy steps just to get down there. Whatever was on the sidewalk (rain, snow etc.) would seep into our lab. It was a real challenge. If you forgot to duck on the way down, your head hit the steel trap door. In any case, we built some work benches and were off building the first generation of Nucleus. It did not take long for us to gain critical acclaim for our sound at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and other trade shows. It did take time to get people to accept a large sphere in their living room. It was probably a year and a half down there before we rented a studio apartment around the corner. That was to become our offices, manufacturing, research and listening room space. Needless to say, you had to move lots of boxes to find my desk, which was located in what used to be the kitchen. There was so little space that we had to store packaging at my apartment and make van trips whenever we ran out. It was there that we switched from the polyethylene cabinet to the spun aluminium one. We felt that we could gain market acceptance if the product looked ultra modern. If it had to be bizarre looking to sound its best, at least make it ultramodern so that it had a fair fighting chance at success. More (3/3) |
