What’s your personal history with the company?
I joined RBI Music in 2015 as Product Manager and Artist Relations to lead the launch of the Vintage brand into the US market, which I’m guessing your UK readers will be familiar with. Prior to that, I worked for Samick Music in Nashville as National Sales Manager and Chief Engineer.
I guess you saw a chance for career advancement with RBI?
Yes. What happened was, the VP at Samick left to take up an opening at RBI. Two or three years later, he left to join another company while they were in discussions with Dennis Drumm at JHS to secure the US distribution deal for the Vintage brand. I was recommended by the outgoing VP and got the job. I had to pack up and move very quickly to get things going, but it worked out.
You are a musician as well as a business executive, do you believe that your experience as a player has helped you in your business career?
I think it is absolutely integral to everything I do. I’m a very late bloomer to the manufacturing side of the MI industry, but I have played in working bands since I was twelve years old. I was playing bass in bar bands before I had a driving licence. I went to college to study music, and throughout the eighties I played in show bands on cruise ships. I moved to Nashville in the early nineties and worked my way into national tours, demo sessions and local gigs there for over 20 years. I was able to make a good living. In the nineties and 2000’s, there was a ton of songwriter demo studio work there. When home computer recording technology really took off with songwriters doing their own demos, I began to see a drop in the level of sessions for studio musicians, I decided on a change of direction.
Practical and engineering skills run in my family, I built my first bass guitar in 1985, and I still have it. So, I combined the two skill sets and looked into the manufacturing side of the music business. I was gigging with a friend for a while who was working at Samick Music, and I asked him to keep an eye out for any openings there, as I might be interested in checking things out. A couple of years later, he let me know he was leaving his job, and it was open if I wanted to apply. The job was as a Customer Service Rep at Samick. I applied and got the job. A year later I was made National Sales Manager, and a year after that in 2014, I was promoted again to Chief Engineer where I worked on the relaunch and design of the Silvertone Guitar brand. RBI Music acquired the Silvertone in 2020, so I’m back working on new products for that brand all over again.
It appears that the way forward for companies in the UK and the US, is the development of facilities in China and Korea, and I was wondering how those links are set up?
We are going to be sourcing some of our Silvertone products out of a factory in China, and 3 factories in the US, but that goes back to a link that our CEO Brad Kirkpatrick had before he purchased the company. A lot of the relationships with these offshore factories go quite a way back. Especially for our Boomwhackers brand with RBI. Our percussion brand Toca Percussion does a lot of manufacturing in Taiwan and in China. So as far as access goes, we have had liaisons with those manufacturing territories for a while now. We design and obtain samples, modify the samples, and when things are sorted out, we start the manufacturing from there. With Vintage Guitars, it’s a bit different because we don’t own the brand, we’re only the US distributor. We source deliveries directly from the manufacturing facility, or from the JHS warehouse in Leeds,UK. When ordering Vintage guitars directly from the factory, there will typically be a container with around seven hundred guitars shipped directly to us in Texas.
Do you have plans for further expansions for either brand development, or territorial expansion, or indeed both?
Yes, but there are some restrictions in place. With distributed brands, like the Vintage brand, we sell within the US only. There are many other distributors that handle the distribution of Vintage globally into their territories. That also applies to a couple of other brands that we deal with. In terms of brands that we own directly, we have a European and Asian Sales Manager who is based in Glasgow Scotland, and for South Aerica, we have a bilingual specialist who lives in Wisconsin here in The States, handling all of South America. We have a team of twelve Sales Managers, that deal with all the individual states within the US.
Are you looking for further territorial expansion elsewhere in the world, or are you content to consolidate the markets that you have already?
We are always looking for new markets, especially when we acquire a new brand. Since I joined the company, we have acquired the Toca Percussion brand, one of the largest percussion brands worldwide, the Silvertone guitars brand and Grover Pro Percussion which make high end instruments for professional orchestras and college level establishments. For those brands, we are always looking for new distributors in different countries we can expand into.
You have an expansive list of endorsees for your guitars, readers here in the UK will know Billy Sherwood from Yes, and Asia. Do you approach individual musicians, or do they come to you seeking an endorsement setup?
Ninety-five per cent of the time they come to us. We don’t currently have a dedicated artist relations specialist within the company looking after guitar product endorsement relationships, so that does fall to me to manage. As the fretted instrument Product Manager for the company, I’m responsible for every aspect of the guitar brands. I have regular meetings with my sales teams to make sure everything is moving in the right direction; I have meetings with the CEO and CFO to ensure that we are meeting our sales and new product goals. Right now, most of my time is spent on product development.
But to return to your question about endorsees, I enjoy a good relationship with our guitar gear endorsers, because as a musician myself, I know how to speak the language. I think that applies to any area where you are dealing with high-level individuals in a specialized environment. A common language and approach evolve, and it helps enormously if you can communicate on that level. Musicians approach us, and we discuss the criteria involved in becoming a brand endorsee, and then myself and our Social Media Coordinator get together and discuss if we are going to move forward together to accept the endorsement request.
Because of your current emphasis on product development, does that mean that your direct involvement with dealership relationships has had to be curtailed for you on a personal day-to-day level?
Yes. When I first joined the company, it was mostly just me getting the Vintage brand started in the US. Finding independent sales reps, local guitar repair techs, talking to advertisers, editing product artwork and description. For the first few years I was traveling constantly with our sales representatives, meeting with dealers, talking with them, showing them samples of guitar products, and that process was a good few years in development. For those first few years we were growing the Vintage brand at around thirty per cent a year, it meant that we needed to hire a National Sales Manager, and then we expanded our team of sales reps, hired another inside sales person. Because I was so busy overseeing brand development, I simply couldn’t do all that at the same time. Currently, I meet occasionally with the outside Sales reps, and help follow up with our dealers if any individual issues arise.
How much has the growth of the Internet impacted on your business, because any major shift in business strategy and practices has both positive and negative influence for you?
Yes, that’s a good question. RBI is very fortunate because a big chunk of our revenue is within the public school early education sector. They’ve been at it for decades and these relationships are very well established. There is very little fluctuation within educational institutions, which makes for a very stable and straightforward working relationship.
Conversely, the guitar retail business can fluctuate considerably. It’s booming one minute and laying off staff the next. With our educational establishments we are pleased to have seen slow and steady growth as time has gone on.
In terms of Internet companies, we know that it is vital to maintain good relationships with all our small independent dealers, we must also keep an eye on the Big Box internet retailers of the world. For instance, our Grover Pro percussion products in are in Sweetwater.com and do very very well. We recently started doing business with a fantastic retailer in ProAudioStar.com, that’s buying our Silvertone and Vintage guitars brands. That’s a big win for us, but we continue to serve our smaller independent dealerships through our sales team of twelve independent sales reps throughout the US.
Do you believe that the future is healthy for manufacturing companies dealing with instruments?
I do one hundred per cent! I can point to so many indicators, but here is the way I like to explain this to people who fear technology is replacing musical instruments, it’s very simple. I’m sixty-two year old. I lived through and played in bands during the late 1970’s and early 80’s when I could play on Wednesday night in a downtown club, and there would be five hundred people there, listening to the band. Through the eighties, the mid-week scene was healthy, and weekends were mobbed with customers. You could make a good living as a musician in a local band. If you fast-forward to the late nineties, dance club culture became more prevalent, DJs became popular and were less expensive for clubs to hire than full live bands. Then synthesizers became affordable and many were predicting the death of my instrument of choice, the bass guitar. The sky is falling! But now, here we are in 2024. There are more bass guitar brands and models than ever before, and more highly skilled bass players around now than there was then.
Now everyone’s talking about the AI software that will write a song for you if you type in a title and a genre. I showed this to my wife who is an award-winning songwriter and she immediately remarked that this would be the death of songwriting in general, but it won’t, any more than any more the synth bass wasn’t the death of the bass guitar. Programming synthesizers didn’t kill live music; it will always be there.
With home recording software, some musicians have replacing their need for studios to record. Income streams for musicians have developed differently, but live music still goes on. People still want to physically play musical instruments, and for that, they need us. I’m playing at a huge club this Saturday called Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth, Texas. There will be at least a thousand people in there listening and dancing to the band. They could put a DJ in there, but the customers still crave live music played by a group of musicians. They can listen to recorded music at home and on their phones, but when they go out, people still want live music played by professional musicians who know how to play instruments and sing. It will always be there, and we will be there to provide instruments for them.
What are the hardest and easiest parts of your job?
The hardest part for me is product development. It can be stressful designing and working out a new product, and then requesting the finances to develop prototypes and demonstration models, and then waiting to see if it’s going to sell well or not. I’ve had some really good successes in developing instruments, but I’ve had a couple of real dogs as well. Sales success is not easily predictable. The rewarding part is knowing that 30 years ago I would never have imagined I would be doing what I am doing now, and enjoying it as much as I do. I never thought that all those years of experience as professional musician, and then in sales, and then designing and developing new products, would lead me to where I am today, with the role that I enjoy so much. It’s been quite a journey.
What is the immediate future for you and for the company?
For the guitar division at RBI, we’re really excited to be receiving our first shipment of the all new Vintage REVO® series guitars. We have a ton of new products in development for the Silvertone brand that I’m really excited about. We are in the process of securing new international distribution deals. There is always something new on the horizon, which always makes life in this crazy business interesting.
ANDY HUGHES