[Harp-L] Online Harmonica Sales

[wlb@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

I had the dream/plan back in the 90's to start an online company selling harps and other assorted small instruments and "musical toys" like jaw harps, kazoos, penny whistles, nose flutes etc. I was going to call it "Pocket Music". I had a wholesale connection for Hohner, Lee Oskar and Huang back then and I was already doing the flea market thing.  That was a lot of fun, sitting at my little table blowing harp and doing "free demonstrations". I sold a lot of $4.00 harps as impulse sales to parents and grandparents for the kids as well as wanna be harp players. Christmas time was awesome as I worked the "stocking stuffer" angle. I also had a supply on hand of better harps in different keys for the "players" that might stop by my table. Face to face sales of things like harps is very different than when someone goes online to buy one. As I did my due diligence I quickly realized that price was going to be the driving force to generate online sales. I was amazed at just how discounted the early online sellers were selling their products. Minimal margins make heavy sales volume a necessity for survival. If you are only going to make a few bucks on a harp you need to sell a heck of a lot of them to pay the bills much less turn a profit! I also realized quickly that to service "real players" you needed to make a fairly large (at least for me) investment in inventory to cover all of the bases key wise and model wise. Especially if you were going to deal with chromatics and the various echo/tremelo models. If you didn't have the inventory you were then going to have the ordeal and sometimes nightmare of the "evil backorder syndrome". People who shop online usually want it cheap and fast! Needless to say I didn't dive into that pool. I could see the writing on the wall. This was not a venture that I saw many positives in except for the fact that I loved the harmonica and it would be nice to sell something that I had a passion for. Let's face it, one of the major challenges in the harmonica business is that it isn't "main stream". You have to work so much harder to create a customer base for something like harmonicas than lets say T-shirts. Everybody wears shirts, not everyone wants to be the next Bob Dylan :-)

I am sorry to hear that Harp House seems to have finished it's run. They were one of the first if I remember. I respect anyone out there actually making living marketing to our "little club". I think the survivors will agree that you have to add some sort of value above just price. Service, service service is very important to create a business with repeat customers. The other thing is to be able to offer product that isn't readily available in many other places. This is why the customizers and specialists of "fringe items" like Jeff Spoors, Greg Heumann, Dennis Oellig etc. have a fighting chance to survive. And isn't that the operative final word, SURVIVE! No one is getting rich playing this game from what I can see.

Warren Bee