In Martin Professional’s early days, it was all smoke and mirrors. Literally. Entrepreneur Peter Johansen founded the company in 1987 in Aarhus, Denmark with the main factory located in the city of Frederikshavn, about 115 miles north of Aarhus. It all started with smoke machines, based on experiments using dry ice in a coffee machine. The Martin name was acquired through cooperation with a French smoke machine company. It soon added lighting products for discotheques but quickly diversified into lighting for the professional markets, particularly lights with moving mirrors such as the PAL 1200 and fixtures with moving heads.
Aarhus is a strong university and engineering city, giving Martin access to the “brightest” experts in the field of optics, bolstering the company’s mastery of the science of controlling light beams and designing components. In the late 1990s, it launched two of its cornerstone products, the MAC 500 and MAC 600, which dramatically amped up its presence and revenue.
Changes in Ownership
The conglomerate Schouw & Co. bought the business in 2000, and with the addition of new factories in Denmark and China, it grew to become the world’s largest manufacturer of intelligent lighting by 2001. After having enjoyed great success with the award-winning industry standard, the MAC 2000 moving head series, the company graduated into LED lighting in 2006. It soon excelled in the color calibration of LEDs and produced the most efficient and high-output LED fixtures in the industry, amassing more than 100 patents. Its MAC Aura, which won a Parnelli Indispensable Technology “IT” Award in 2012, was the first LED moving head wash light to combine multicolor beam LEDs with a backlight LED array and built-in FX engine that takes the synthetic look out of LED wash lights. The MAC Viper Profile and its stablemate, the Viper Quadray, were also recognized with industry honors.
Like most others, Martin was sucked into the turbulent waters the world economic crisis of 2008. Many of its customers in the lighting rental industry, if they survived at all, stopped buying new products and tried to get by with the gear they had on hand. Martin’s revenues nosedived, but the sense of urgency inspired it to cut costs, restructure its different geographical regions, outsource some of its component manufacturing, close its Chinese factory and above all, invest heavily in LED technology and innovation. When the crisis abated in 2011, Martin emerged a much stronger, leaner and faster company. Further, its reputation, exhaustive catalog of products and valuable patents made it very attractive to other companies. In March 2013, it was acquired by the legendary infotainment and audio giant Harman International Industries, home of AKG, BSS, Crown, dbx, JBL, Soundcraft/Studer and more.
“This was an important milestone for us,” explains Villads Thomsen, Martin’s vice president for global sales. “With Harman, we have a strategic owner that knows the industry inside and out and serves the same customers and market segments as we do. Together, we can offer total solutions—audio, lighting, video, controllers, servers, effects—to the entertainment, architectural and commercial sectors. Harman and Martin is a great match. With their strong technological platforms, the combination of two industry leaders will also bring innovations that benefit the entire market.”
Touring and Installations
Currently, the touring rental market (in which Martin sells gear to rental companies) makes up about 70 percent of Martin’s business. The other 30 percent comes from the installation market. “We are by far number one by market share in the touring market worldwide by a significant margin from our nearest competitors,” says Thomsen. “In the fixed installation market, our strategy is to make it a larger part of our business. This includes the sub-segments of houses of worship, stadiums and arenas, nightclubs, hotels, theme parks and cruise ships, where we can offer the complete package of audio, video and lighting. We want to use our DNA, so to speak, from our touring market and apply it to the installation market, so that those customers can achieve some of the same effects, be unique and stand out from competition in their market.”
Cruise ships, one of Martin’s most successful installation segments, offer a microcosm of the company’s capabilities. “Today’s cruise ships involve all the different applications that we serve individually,” Thomsen points out. “They have restaurants, theaters, concert halls, retail areas, casinos, night clubs, themed spaces and outdoor recreation. All of these use lighting to fuel emotion and create an ambience that attracts passengers out of their cabins.”
In recent years, it has been nearly impossible to avoid seeing Martin products in action. They’ve helped light concerts for every sort of act, including Korn, Paul McCartney, Pixies, Lady Gaga, Dierks Bentley, One Direction, The Killers, The Rolling Stones, Taylor Swift, Pitbull, Elton John, Norah Jones, Mötley Crüe, Maroon 5 and many more—in fact, it might take less space to list acts that haven’t used Martin products. Martin lighting also illuminated the World Cup opening ceremonies, Super Bowl XLVII at the Superdome in New Orleans, the Olympics, the Eurovision Song Contest, television’s The X Factor, the MTV Music Awards, the 2014 Detroit Auto Show, the televised 2014 NFL Draft, the
Changlong International Circus Festival (China) and Miami’s Ultra Music Festival. Martin fixtures are a permanent fixture in applications as diverse as the London Opera House’s 400 performances a year, Broadway musicals, London’s Wembley Stadium, Moscow’s Space nightclub and the global broadcasts of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, CA.
This year, the company completed work on two projects that seemed to reach for the sky. In Doha, Qatar, Martin lit the roof of the new Lusail arena, a project that included the use of more than 165,000 LED dots, effectively turning the roof into a large format video screen. Near the Linq Hotel in Las Vegas, Martin and Harman collaborated on the lighting and sound for the world’s tallest Ferris wheel, called, of course, the High Roller. Enclosed, air-conditioned gondolas fly passengers to a height of 550 feet in a revolution that takes 30 minutes. Its lighting design can be programmed for different themes and different times of the day and night.
Ample Customer Support
Along with 600 employees on hand from Miami to Milan, Moscow to Manila and many points in between, Martin works with locally-based partners in more than 100 countries. Also for approved customers, Martin’s “myMartin” portal at my.martin.com is never farther than a click away at the nearest Internet-connected computer or mobile device, offering product information, pricing, availability, special campaigns and account management. And in addition to its 30 years of experience in leading-edge technologies, the company is also now backed by Harman’s vast resources and skills.
Although the company now offers a menagerie of more than 300 products and 10,000 parts, it continues to launch new items across all of its product lines, from the latest models in the award-winning MAC Quantum LED family to creative new LED video products, innovative lighting controllers, new atmospheric smoke solutions and more.
Given the company’s achievements, status and roster of high-profile clients, one might wonder, can only the big dogs play with Martin’s toys? “We launched a sub-brand called RUSH by Martin to address that issue,” says Thomsen. “It offers products for those with more modest budgets, such as small clubs, restaurants, churches and local bands, that want to start with a small set of fixtures. The line is sold by our approved customers and through retailers such as Guitar Center in the U.S.”
Not Just Eco-Friendly
Martin Professional is also proud of its “green” efforts. It regards environmental regulations, laws and codes as only minimum standards that it strives at all times to exceed through recycling, use of recycled materials, reduced consumption, minimized waste, higher efficiency products and regular environmental audits. And visitors to martin.com will find what amounts to an environmental manifesto on the company website.
And Martin apparently isn’t just eco-friendly. How many other companies have a manufacturing plant called the Happy Factory? That’s Martin’s Frederikshavn facility, where the factory floor, automated logistics, open-office environment, and social and recreational spaces join together to create an employee-friendly workspace.
