One year without our captain

Dear partner,

Today marks one year since the sudden loss of Henk.

Because of this we would like to share how this year has been for us and what developments are to be expected. Today and tomorrow we will all commemorate Henk in our own personal way and as a group.

Dear Partner, Today marks one year since the sudden loss of Henk. Because of this we would like to share how this year has been for us and what developments are to be expected. Today and tomorrow we will all commemorate Henk in our own personal way and as a group.

The past year In the days and weeks after Henk's passing we received many reactions and cards, it was clear Henk had a special place in the hearts of many people. We were comforted by your heart warming reactions. The possibility to personally visit for a last farewell was used by a lot of people, where in style of Henk we toasted with a cocktail and spareribs from his favourite restaurant ‘Castell’. Unfortunately due to the lack of space the funeral service could only be attended by a small group of family, friends and our team. But the amount of people that followed the funeral service online speak for Henk's impact and legacy. And then our journey really took off. Interstate Audio without Henk. Looking back we’re proud to say that although we sailed on without our captain, we but haven’t been adrift for a single moment. We soon realized Henk left his heart and knowledge distributed over the colleagues and together we are a complete jigsaw puzzle. Especially when Ralph re-joined our team after the summer. With clear vision we started building a sustainable future for the company, both with changes within our organization as at product level. As a tornado we cleared and cleaned our warehouse and discontinued obsolete products. We can see nice growth in sales of our new products like the NewHank DAB FM PLUS, Blaze Audio (for BeNeLux area) and Xilica UC / GIO solutions. And our ProDJuser Pioneer DJM-A9 case, CDJ3000 case stock could hardly keep up with the demand. We’ve had the privilege to welcome two Interstate baby’s this year: Jinte, daughter of Hylke in September and in February Jade, daughter of Esmé was born. For more flexibility we upgraded our IT giving us more reliability, security and to be able to have a good balance between working and be home for our kids. Something of great value to Henk as well. The future In our last mailing we wrote we’re moving our offices to our warehouse, the construction is advancing as planned and we enjoy seeing the progress made every day. We’re also quite far in the process of selecting new ERP software that should allow future growth. With this new software we can optimize our internal processes and improve our service to our customers. We take one step at a time, first we finish the construction and after that we plan to implement the new ERP software. We also continually develop new products, we expect new audio, video and multimedia products from NewHank and investigate updating our mixing console program. Xilica legacy products, like XP, XD, Neutrino and Rio series, will continue under the ACX brand name when current stock in the factory is cleared. We expect new products and upgrades from Blaze Audio and keep an eye open for what other products we can add to the LEGO kit we call ‘Interstate Audio’ for an even more complete program. We want to thank you for all your kind words, your trust and also from your side ‘business as usual’ this past year. Best regards, Esmé, Patrick, Ralph, Machiel, Picas en Hylke