TV & Sound ‘reborn’

An iconic Palmerston North audio services shop is being reborn by a new owner who grew up visiting the store to build wishlists of audio equipment he thought he could never afford. Manawatu¯ TV and Sound Services, on the south-west corner of The Square, went into liquidation in April, almost exactly 51 years after James ‘‘Jim’’ Bulloch started the company. BDO New Zealand liquidators Iain Shephard and Jessica Kellow’s final report was released on Monday, and in the final accounting the store was $630,000 in debt. The liquidators kept the doors open for a while but ultimately the store closed, until it was sold for $45,000 in July to Brendon Gilbert, who has revived the store as the Manawatu¯ Sound Hub. Gilbert moved from Tauranga in July after running a successful audio services store there for 20 years. He had grown up in Manawatu¯, and he wanted to be back home closer to his family in Levin and Feilding. He said Manawatu¯ TV and Sound Services was a Palmerston North icon. ‘‘I remember always coming in to look at all the [top-range equipment] that I wanted, but I could never afford.’’ Gilbert spent two months refitting and restocking the store, before it reopened in August. One highlight was clearing out the nostalgic treasure trove of the storage room. It was filled to the brim with decades of formerly state-of-the art TV and audio equipment, a vast collection of cassettes, and even a few vacuums from different eras. ‘‘They’d just hoarded everything . . . it was really cool, you could see the history of the store and the industry.’’ In its heyday, Manawatu¯ TV and Sound Services employed 90 people, in seven stores and had an annual turnover of well over $10 millon. But in recent years, the market had shifted and the company shrunk to a single, struggling store.