Background
Ride up to a Trek Bicycle Company store in Berkeley, California, then hop on a flight to see one halfway across the country in Wisconsin. Different buildings, different staff, different states – same vibe. Trek puts a premium on consistency of experience, and a surprising amount of that comes down to music.
Getting that consistency took Trek years. It meant standardizing a music service across a fleet that has grown rapidly in 3 1/2 years. It meant asking store teams to accept that the playlist was now a company decision. By the time Verkada Sound Systems came up, Trek was using the Soundtrack service and race sponsor JBL’s speakers in the ceilings at most sites, and had no appetite for starting over.
So Verkada didn't ask them to. Sound Systems’ native Soundtrack integration meant Trek could bring the JBL speakers and music service it was already using into Command, where it lived alongside the company’s existing cameras and alarms. Trek began with three stores — Madison East, Madison West, and Berkeley. Each install took under 30 minutes.
The challenge: What Trek couldn’t give up
Josh Borgmeyer has been at Trek since 2004. He has been a tour guide leading trips through Europe, a product specialist working alongside the engineering team, and the person who built Trek's technical training school – a program that takes someone who does not yet know righty-tighty and helps them learn to become a master technician. Today he runs retail process implementation: opening stores, moving stores, and folding acquired stores into the Trek standard. In the past year, he also became the directly responsible individual for security, alarms, cameras, and audio.
Music sits inside that remit, and it carries more weight at Trek than it does at most retailers.
"Our senior leadership is very passionate about music."
The reason is consistency. Bike shops attract people with strong and varied tastes; Borgmeyer describes teams where one person loves hip hop, another country, another metal, all working the same floor. He is diplomatic about where that leads: “that can lead to some interesting dynamics that we have seen over the years.”
"If you go to Oakland and then you go to Berkeley, I mean, they're 10 miles away, right? But we want to have that consistent feel between that shopping experience."
The standard is deliberately unfussy: nothing abrasive, nothing that catches a customer off guard. Borgmeyer describes the target as closer to zen than to hype, and points to Lululemon and Walmart as the benchmarks Trek's leadership studies.
Three things had to survive any change to how that music gets played.
The speakers: JBL has sponsored Trek race teams since the 1990s, so any new platform had to be flexible enough to work with existing speaker hardware.
The service: Trek was happy with Soundtrack. The catalog worked, the channels worked, and, more to the point, many stores had already been taught to use it.
The guardrails: Operations curates the list of approved channels; stores choose from it and can request additions; the central team keeps override authority. Trek's philosophy is to take tasks off the store's plate, not add them.
"We do have a curated list that stores can choose from and ask for and put that request in. But we truly want to have those guardrails, because we don't want the experience to go sideways."
The solution: Cloud-managed audio in under 30 minutes
There was a second reason a heavy rollout was unappealing.
When Trek deployed Soundtrack across the fleet, it could not send people to every site. It wrote a standard operating procedure and mailed it out.
"We weren't able to deploy team members to go to all the sites and we had to deliver an SOP for that implementation. Not all team members are tech savvy or IT savvy with that. So there were some bumps."
That is the real constraint on any multi-site retail deployment: any platform that needs an A/V specialist per location does not scale to hundreds of stores. Fast, frustration-free, no-expert-required installation can make that deployment much simpler:
"It had to have been less than 30 minutes for everything to get installed. It was plugging in some ports and it was live. It was extremely, extremely easy."
No hardware needed to come out. The JBL pendants stayed in the ceiling. The network audio player simply bridged them into Command.
Borgmeyer, who has written more store-deployment SOPs than most people will read, estimates what that document would look like: for a store that already has its receiver and Soundtrack player, the migration runs to about five steps at most.
And those five steps make the difference between a rollout that needs a truck and one that needs a paragraph for a multi-state or international retail footprint.
The outcome: What the network audio player buys them
Once a store is in Command, its music sits next to its cameras and its alarms.
That consolidation is the payoff Borgmeyer names first, and he is precise about what it is and isn't. He counts clicks – a real habit, not a figure of speech; he measures his day by how many clicks it takes to execute each task – which means having more functionality in one place matters.
"I don't have to have multiple screens open. I think that we all probably have a ton of screens open on our desktops. So it's narrowing down all those pieces. And how can I simplify my day? Through this integration, it is allowing me to simplify my day."
In Command, Borgmeyer has cameras, alarms, and now music across his Verkada sites in one view. Volume control sits right there – useful, because Trek holds stores to a standard decibel level. He can see what each store is playing and change it if a store has pushed the guardrails. Midway through the interview he read the three sites off his screen: Tina Charles in Madison East, Sam Smith in Madison West, Justin Bieber in Berkeley.
"If I, as a DRI for these platforms, get a request from senior leadership, from my boss, director of retail, I can easily navigate and deliver the answers."
Asked what he would tell a peer running hundreds of locations, he started with one word, simplification, and landed on a better one:
"For a retail support team that supports all of our stores and takes those phone calls, takes those emails, and they're grinding daily to figure out the solutions for our stores. This is an easy button."
Looking ahead: Why Verkada, and what's next
Trek's Sound Systems expansion is tied to a larger decision. Borgmeyer manages relationships with several security providers, and he is candid about the comparison.
"I will be honest on this. Through my management of security and working with our other security providers, the experience isn't the same. Verkada offers personal attention, and a great customer service experience; plus there’s the overall ease of use that Verkada has provided for managing our security.
"So we as an org are really looking at how do we grow our footprint and transition to Verkada as our only security and camera provider. And with that, I see the integration into Sound Systems continuing to expand with that rollout into additional sites."
