Dave’s Guitar ShopGlory Days For The Guitar Business?

Only sell guitars!

Stocks 3,000 – 4,000 guitars at any given time.

Selection that most people never see in real life!

Acoustic and electric; new, used, and vintage; custom shop, left handed, and very rare.

Dave’s personal guitar museum of 400 rare guitars (Some valued 500,000 or more)

Building the Empire

Worked in a full line music store at 21.

Set up guitar repair shop out of his moble home.

Eventually set up Dave’s Guitar Shop, stocked with only 15 of his own guitars in 1982.

1990- guitar sales were down, big stores told Fender to leave them alone and approach Dave.

Building the Empire (cont.) Cyber Space! – It became possible to

put a picture of a guitar online and have it seen by thousands of potential buyers worldwide.

This made it possible to open a bigger shop in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Shop expanded from 400 square feet to 20,000 square feet.

Guitarded or Strategy?

People called Dave crazy for only selling one product.

Dave was told to cash in on the synthesizer craze or be gone in a year.

Dave Stuck to his guns and said: “Guitars are all I know.”

He kept to his dream as a guitar specialist and disregarded the negative criticism.

Other strategies

85% of sales are web based Treats all customers like a king, no

matter the age or experience. The in store experience Dave says: “I just wanted people to

come in and just freak out! I wanted thousands of guitars lined up- shiny, perfect, beautiful.”

Now

“I think were now in a golden age for guitar building and a real glory time to be a guitar dealer.

Staff includes 14 employees including: 8 salesmen and 3 full time repair techs trained by the Redwing instrument program.

Always going to be just guitars.

I’m a guitar freak and I’ve never done anything I wasn’t CRAZY about!

-Dave Rogers