Meet Will Bodewes | Founder & CEO of Spoke Sound

We had the good fortune of connecting with Will Bodewes and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Will, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
Ever since I was little I have always been fascinated by the idea of creating new things. The idea of building something that no one has ever done before and having people buy and use it has always inspired me. Before I even knew what it was called I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I went to school for mechanical engineering because I wanted to learn how to design “things”. I had been keeping a long list of business ideas throughout school and when I graduated I went back and looked through over 150 different ideas and settled on the “speaker picture”. The ideas of a speaker picture appealed to me because I was constantly fighting the battle of finding good audio without having to look at bulky/ ugly speakers. I suppose I started Spoke Sound because I wanted to take a part in making the world more beautiful, both acoustically and visually. It’s been incredible to watch Spoke Sound evolve from a tinny sounding prototype to a full fledged product in the market.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
Spoke Sound is pioneering the personalized audio space with our new “speaker picture”. Our speakers look identical to a 1.5″ thick canvas wrapped photograph, and can be customized with any image. With a simple and easy connection to Bluetooth our speakers are a great way to experience audio without cluttering up your space with an ugly speaker. We also partner with artists and photographers to allow them to create an audio visual experience that was previously impossible.

Spoke Sound has developed, patented, and created our first speaker picture, Swell, after nearly 3 years of research. I think a lot of people see our product online and say, soo you just put a small speaker behind a picture? That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Our speakers actually take a fundamentally different approach to creating sound that actually turns the surface of the photo to a speaker. This way the canvas wrap doesn’t muffle or distort the sound as a traditional cone based speaker would. I could go on for hours about the technology but I think its just one of those things that needs to be heard to believed. This simple fact is one of the biggest challenges we have faced during COVID. Because everything went remote it was hard for people to hear the sound quality and understand really what we were doing. Fortunately, we had a few faithful customers who were willing to try it out and we started growing word of mouth from them.

With some of our early speakers we ran into issues with software and connection issues. For this we had to have several speakers returned for repair. I learned from this that kindness, understanding and good customer service goes a long way to keeping your reputation as a brand.

I suppose I want the word to know that our speaker solution is out there. We’re a Colorado based company and our mission is to make the world a more beautiful place, one speaker at a time.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I’m actually from Durango, but I’ve had the pleasure to enjoy the Denver area a bit. I really enjoy hiking/ trail running so I would have to spend a day in the mountains exploring. I would probably take a drive up to green mountain and go for a hike/ run there. Then would head back to Denver to stop off at Café Mexicali – by far and away my favorite burrito place. After that I suppose I would check out what shows/ events were going on go try something knew! There’s always something going on downtown that it is hard to go wrong!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I’d love to give a shout out to my brother Luke. I’m not sure that he really knows this but when I was deciding what to do after school I called him up and pitched him the speaker picture idea. He was super supportive and really helped me get a start on the legal and business part of the company while I got to work on the engineering.

Website: www.spoke=sound.com

Instagram: @spoke.sound @willbodewes

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-bodewes/

Facebook: @spokesound