# Bang & Olufsen's New COO on Why Luxury Shouldn't Mean Exclusive > Nikolaj Wendelboe went from CFO to interim CEO to COO within a matter of months. At the brand's Singapore flagship, he makes the case for room-reading speakers, a hand-polished collaboration with Hiroshi Fujiwara, and luxury that doesn't shut people out. - Source: VUUQUE - Canonical URL: https://vuuque.com/article/bang-olufsen-coo-nikolaj-wendelboe-interview - Author: VUUQUE Editorial - Section: Home - Published: 2026-08-23T14:15:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-23T14:15:00.000Z - Tags: Bang & Olufsen, Nikolaj Wendelboe, Audio, Design, Interview --- Few executives change job titles as fast as Nikolaj Wendelboe has this year. He joined Bang & Olufsen's leadership as chief financial officer, stepped in as interim chief executive, and has since settled into a newly created role as chief operating officer, all while keeping a hand on the finance side of the business. He met us at the brand's Singapore flagship, a store built less like a showroom and more like a living room: sofas, coffee, and conversation nooks in place of the usual wall of speakers. ## A hundred-year-old brief, still unfinished Bang & Olufsen passed its hundredth anniversary last year, and Wendelboe talks about the company's next chapter less as reinvention than continuation. Founders Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen set out in 1925 to build the best possible audio system and to keep pushing the technology forward, and Wendelboe frames that as the same mandate his team is working from today. Recent engineering pushes include speakers that read the acoustics of whatever room they're placed in and calibrate themselves accordingly, plus a customization program that lets buyers choose their own color combinations. His bigger operational headache, he says, is consistency: making sure a customer gets the same brand experience whether they walk into the Singapore store, one in Paris, or one in Los Angeles, a job that ultimately comes down to the local staff representing the brand in each market. ## Making the case that luxury doesn't mean exclusive Wendelboe pushes back on the idea that luxury has to mean shutting people out. He points to a global pool of roughly 340 million people who buy a luxury item occasionally rather than filling a home with them, and argues that an entry-level pair of earbuds or headphones can be the start of a much longer relationship with a customer who eventually trades up to a full speaker system. The one place he says the company won't bend is quality: materials or even a product's shape can flex to hit an acoustic target, but the sound standard itself doesn't move, he says, pointing to how a slimmer speaker cabinet makes it harder to fit the drivers needed for good sound. ## A hand-finished collaboration, and a rock and roll off-hours The brand's collaboration with Hiroshi Fujiwara's Fragment label pushed that engineering discipline in an unexpected direction. Fujiwara wanted a hand-polished "piano black" finish on the ear cups of the H100 headphones, a look the company's standard finishing process wasn't built to produce without compromising how the headphones felt in hand. Getting there took dedicated R&D, and Wendelboe says the technique the team developed for Fragment is now available for future products. Off the clock, his taste runs to rock rather than the classical or ambient sounds often associated with high-end audio: he cites Metallica, Guns N' Roses, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam as formative listening, doesn't play an instrument himself, and counts a recent Metallica show in Copenhagen among the concerts he's caught lately. --- Originally published by VUUQUE. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://vuuque.com/article/bang-olufsen-coo-nikolaj-wendelboe-interview.