Fox Acoustics Expands

Fox Acoustics, Houma, Louisiana, maker of subwoofer boxes, is expanding its operations and expects to more than quadruple output over the next few years to become one of the larger suppliers in the category, it said.

The company, which launched in 1996 by Joe Fox, had set out to expand years earlier but was hit with two natural disasters.  In 2020, its 10K square foot facility burnt down, resulting in a $1.4 million loss on equipment.  The company recovered and moved into five 10K square foot buildings to expand.  Then last year, Hurricane Ida leveled one of the buildings.

Fox said it has now regrouped, purchased new CNC machines, and is embarking on expansion.  It had been producing 50 to 75 boxes a day and expects to ramp up to 400 to 600 boxes a day. When a fifth building is completed “it will put us up to 800 to 1,000 boxes a day,” Fox said, making it one of the largest enclosure producers in North America, he claimed. “We’re bringing in a 700 ton injection molding machine to start making product at a higher and more consistent pace,” Fox said.

Joe Fox has an interesting background.  He caught the car audio bug at age 12 when his mother, looking for a used car, purchased a Rockford demo Jeep from a local car audio shop that was going out of business. Mrs. Fox just wanted a car at a good price, but it happened to include a wall of eight 18 inch subwoofers and could produce over 150dB.  When she showed the Jeep to her son, he was hooked.

Fox began making subwoofer boxes in shop class in high school. Soon he was selling the boxes to other students.   “Other kids were making bird houses,” he quipped, while he was turning shop class into a mini business, enlisting some of the classmates to help assemble the boxes.

Eventually, the local car audio shop, Dynamic Audio, showed up and asked to see some of Fox’s boxes. He told Fox  “You are cutting into my business. Instead of selling them to the kids, sell them to me.”

Fox turned his enterprise into a registered business that was also a DECA project for high school credit.  That was the beginning of Fox Acoustics.

Until recently, Fox turned down new customers as it was recovering from the fire and hurricane.  It currently works with about 190 dealers, but will be adding more.  It offers vehicle specific enclosures but will expand to universal models, once production increases to a certain point, Fox said.   The company will be introducing new models at KnowledgeFest in Las Vegas February 3-5.