Carlon Lamson Sessions (www.carlon.com) is making inroads into the residential market with a new line of structured cabling products.
The company began to think residential after hearing feedback from cable installers who wanted to work in the home cabling market. The Cleveland, OH-based company, whose parent company is Lamson & Sessions, makes optical-fiber/copper and coaxial cable protection and management products. Its new product line is called Carlon Structured Cable Management Systems. While the company launched its residential cabling line in September 2001, it says recent interest in the line has been "overwhelming."
Specifically engineered for residential and commercial low-voltage applications, the line contains a variety of brackets, boxes, flexible raceways, fittings and accessories. Each are designed to make low-voltage installations faster and easier for installers.
Resi-Gard, a general purpose flexible raceway, has been designed specifically for the residential cabling products. "It comes with orange brackets and boxes that give the homeowner a truly future-proofed home," says Renee Bruno, senior product marketing analyst for Carlon, a business unit of the Lamson & Sessions Co.
Bruno says the company is trying to position itself as a leader in the market of non-metallic cable management products for structured cabling and other inside and outside plant applications. "This is one piece of the pie," says Bruno.
"We are the only manufacturer that offers a complete system of brackets, boxes and raceways," Bruno claims. "We want to maintain that as the market grows."
While the new Carlon Lamson line can be used in commercial applications, the company is aiming specifically for the residential market–a decision made after hosting focus groups that zeroed in on commercial products for multi-dwelling units.
"Contractors [said they] were taking our electrical products, like our blue electrical zip boxes, and they would cut off the back of the zip box so it was just a bracket—and then bend the cable in," says Bruno. Electrical and telecom distributors nationwide, she adds, have signed up for the program. The company is in the process of conducting more focus groups and marketing studies on the success of the new product line.