We have a saying in the company: it has to smell, feel and sound like B&O

your hand in front of it and the glass doors open up – even my kids said: “Woah, that’s really cool.”

We take that experience into the Balance product. If you look at the top of the Balance, when you approach it, you have the sensors lighting up. So it’s basically

How important is heritage to Bang & Olufsen’s approach to design?

KT: If you follow us on social media, there are a lot of enthusiasts out there who are renovating our products, changing capacitors on them, changing displays and keeping them alive. And acoustically they’re still really, really good. Even though they were designed a long, long time ago.

That was a little bit of the inspiration for [recreating] the classic Beogram 4000 [as the Beogram 4000c]. To take that 50-year-old kind of product, refurbish it with a new colour, plastics and wood, and also put in some new technology so that you can connect it to the Balance speaker as well, isn’t that a cool connection between the past and the future?

JG: Also one of the things we’re using the Classics programme for is looking into what we can learn from the classics in terms of longevity. With the Beogram, we’re looking into: what kind of materials are actually long-lasting? What kind of products? What kind of form? What kind of technologies do we need to consider? And then actually reusing that knowledge to create the next classic. We have our 100-year anniversary coming up, right? We want to make a splash with it and hopefully create the next big, big project, like the Beolab 90s.

What are your plans leading up to and beyond the anniversary?

KT: There’s a story to be told that hasn’t really been told yet. And we can really add to that story over the next five years. We’ve spent a lot of time with consumers, understanding what their needs are and how the world is changing, and we’re taking that view into the design, acoustics and the homes of consumers. Again, we have designs that we want to target, with the music and the design basically in unison.

[On top of that] the classic programme is here to stay. And we will have the limited edition programme as well – where we do limited editions and collaborations – and the bespoke programme, which will be added to all three product categories that we have.

But that is the overarching philosophy. Understand consumers, fulfil their needs, and make products that will excite them for the future.