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According to Linked In Brock is still StewMac's vice president of marketing.

Edit: StewMac was sold sometime around the third quarter of 2020 (the article I read was dated Sept 2020). Buyer was Champlain Capital Partners, a private equity fund based in San Francisco, California. That doesn't necessarily give me a warm fuzzy about StewMac's future.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

They've had several changes in leadership over the years--I remember talking to Jay Hostetler about it years back over a beer. They've always managed to survive and move on. And most importantly serve the community.

I always hate when "capital partners" of any kind buy a business, but it's not necessarily an act of doom. Sort of the way it goes nowadays. Sometimes the capital partners turn out to be OK after all.

Dave

Seems like a common MO of private equity funds is to buy a business, slash operational costs to make the business look more profitable, and then flip it ASAP to take their gains and run. I hope that's not the case for StewMac.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

also borrowing money as well to pay back the investors money before flipping it saddled with debt

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http://www.Harvestmoonguitars.com

So still waiting on refund from being over charged. The only way to get a hold of them is thru Instagram messenger. Now this is a business model I really want to support. Thee annoying thins is I've ordered $3,000 worth of products in the last week. WTF Stewmac?

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https://www.instagram.com/fostinoguitars/
https://www.facebook.com/PuraVidaUkuleles/

That is such a decline in customer support from where they used to be. Very sad.

I really hope this is just a blip, and the customer service ship will be righted. It would be a shame to see Stew Mac go away. How many times do we read someone complain about their prices and see that complaint met with several people indicating that they can stomach the higher prices because of the excellent service they provide. It seems like that service should be the last thing they relax on.

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Bryan Bear PMoMC

Take care of your feet, and your feet will take care of you.

I won’t comment on whether this is a permanent problem, but StewMac would not be the first “A level” provider of customer service to lower its level of service during Covid (understandably) and then just never take it back up to “A level.” There are a few different reasons why it happens, some more forgivable than others. I hope it is just temporary, and I hope it is an accidental issue, rather than the product of a deliberate decision.

Just a recent anecdote. I ordered three different sets of Erlewine DVDs last week. The order arrived on Saturday, with two of the DVDs and one of the new style ZFiles. I used the contact form on Saturday to notify SM about the mixup. I got email yesterday (wednesday) from Richard L. apologizing both for the mixup and the delay in responding. The missing DVD has been shipped, and I was offered the option of paying for the file at a 25% discount, or getting a return authorization and shipping label. Being a sucker for gadgets, I opted to keep and pay for the file.

FWIW, anyways.
Dan

I would have given you the file that's BS that you have to go to any effort what so ever for their mistake. When we make a mistake and I made one once in 2013 we rip up the bill.

Yeah, 25%?! That means they are still profiting. Especially when they are just trusting that the person will even return it, seems like they would at least give a little more incentive like 50%.

Pat

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Pat

I agree with Hesh. They shouldn't be charging you anything for a file you didn't order and you shouldn't have to deal with sending it back.

It's strange they would take that position on the file. A while back, I received a buffer motor from them that was damaged during shipping. The control box housing on top of the motor got crunched. The motor still worked though so it wasn't a functional problem, it just looked bad. They shipped me a new motor and told me to keep the first one ($192). That got taken care of in one day by email.

Last Christmas, I received an inspection lamp with a power cable and wall outlet adaptor. The light turned out to be defective in the power cable connector so the light wouldn't stay on. They said they would ship me a new one but they would verify that it worked first. Turned out they weren't able to find a lamp that didn't have the problem so they credited me for the cost of all three components. That got taken care of in two days by email.

All of my contacts with StewMac have been positive experiences so I hope the current situation is temporary.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

Amateur night, compounded. Ship the wrong stuff, and why don't you pay for the stuff we sent by mistake....

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Peter Havriluk

With the current state of the economy, perhaps we should cut them a little slack. They may be counting nickels to make payroll (I don't know their situation). They may not be able to give things away if they can recoup a little bit.
For many of us a Stew Mac order is not something we have to have. For the professionals among us, I can sympathize with your frustration, but there are other suppliers for most of the things Stew Mac offers.

the email addy I use that gets emails from SM is a secondary account, and I don't regularly log in to it...that being said, I noticed I haven't received a pretty much daily advertisement from them in a couple of weeks...

Good point. I used to get daily emails from StewMac on 2 different addys... None of late. Change in policy, or?

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

I still get the StewMac e-mails; I received one today. If it is not daily, it is almost daily. If you aren’t getting them, you must have opted out, or a spam filter is catching them.

I miss their printed catalog. I’ve asked three times with no response.
When I want something from SM, I order it thru Amazon.
Amazon fixes supplier errors without a hassle.

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wah
Wah-wah-wah-wah
Wah

I keep telling them I can't browse their stupid website in the bathroom.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

I appreciate this thinking and we all need to cut everyone some additional slack we are in a historic global pandemic that has supply chains far and wide on their ears.

Or.....

Two words, vulture capital.... SM is under different ownership than back in the day when I was learning to build around 2005. Since then we've noticed prices on the rise, considerably and we are not usually price sensitive either. And we noted some changes in in service levels too. We are not members of SM and don't buy from them often enough to justify.

When you have to achieve ROI in addition to meeting payroll someone may get shorted. Seems from these comments some customers feel like they were shorted.

Interestingly we purchase very little from SM or LMI and it's actually been years since we purchased anything from LMI. SM is still a great source for newbs and non-commercial entities and for special tools like fret crowning files. But most other things we have long since found other suppliers often who supplies SM.

SM remains a great site to learn about all the stuff that you may not find in a commercial Lutherie shop and their documentation on many things is second to none. I would support them if you can and if it does not cost you more or much more. OTOH SM has a duty to be competitive on pricing and offerings because that is what the marketplace demands.

Hesh wrote:
"SM remains a great site to learn about all the stuff that you may not find in a commercial Lutherie shop and their documentation on many things is second to none. I would support them if you can and if it does not cost you more or much more. OTOH SM has a duty to be competitive on pricing and offerings because that is what the marketplace demands."

How many of us can remember walking down to the local hardware store and getting a piece of glass cut to size to replace a broken pane in a single pane window? You don't see glass cutters in the big box stores - there is no money in it for them! Single pane windows are becoming a thing of the past also.
And people go to the local music store to beat on a guitar model they are interested in and then buy it online for a few dollars less. The brick and mortar provides the service and the online shop makes the sales. People want first rate service, but don't want to cover the costs involved. Having a competitive edge often means leaving something out and "service" is often one of the most expensive items and the most expendable.
Stew Mac often shows us tool mods and how to use them, and provides a convenient way to acquire them, and then we either mod them ourselves or find them cheaper elsewhere. We want both the service and the cheap price.
In the immortal words of Pogo Possum "We have met the Enemy and He is Us"

Yes, it seems at the national level that customer service is dead, but locally - the places that are really thriving are the places that still offer excellent customer service. Which explains why I am still in demand despite not advertising since 1990 and telling anyone who will listen that I am retired. I say NO all the time. I keep raising my prices. And yet - I keep getting phone calls and emails, and my bench is nearly always occupied.

Personal service is always in demand, never goes out of style, and is always appreciated. Period.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

A while back my desktop computer e-mail quit letting me receive any mail from certain senders with certain suffixes. I noticed when relatives I talked to on the phone said they had e-mailed me. I couldn't get around it with that account, so I switched to a different e-mail carrier and started another account. All I know is that the old one would block senders in the "filters" section of the old e-mail. Maybe that could help if you try contacting them through another account.

Agreed!

Had my 26 month old Honda with 17K miles on it.... in the Honda dealership where I bought it yesterday for an oil change, software update and tire rotation. What has taken 45 minutes in the past and was anticipated to take 1 hour as they told me took 2.5 hours. The tires were not set to what I asked for 34 lbs and one of them was at 27 lbs.... The car was not washed as they always do.

Honda is legendary for great service and fast too..... Not yesterday....

I was one of the first people in the air after 9/11 and I took a flight to Evansville, IN to see a client and then to SFO where I was stationed. Service was non-existent, lunches no longer served, liquids not permitted on the aircraft and the airline people were nastier than usual using the change in our nation after 9/11 to throw service out the door.

This is happening too with the pandemic and I've noticed some businesses have stepped up and many have adopted a "take it or leave it, my way of the highway attitude."

I made a good part of my living after my early retirement consulting with smaller business as to how they can thrive in the Internet age and have what I called "a parasitic relationship with the big box store's marketing spend" where say G*itar Center spends the big bucks promoting a product and the local music store gets the sale. Why? Because people WANT to buy from people. We want a like minded sort who may even appreciate our choices to help us with a transaction where we can hold the item, play the item, take our time and then ask for a new one in the box to take home We also want service and we also want to be treated like family when we spend big bucks somewhere.

I still think that the Mom and Pop's will come back, someday... and the main reason why is going to be service or more specifically lack of service from the Internet sellers. Keep an eye too on "right to repair" laws that are being created that would help local businesses in the future too and deny manufacturers a monopoly on the service side of computers, cars, guitars etc.

I don't see SM ever hurting unless they spend too much and can't pay their bills. There will always be demand for what they do and very little competition because frankly you have to be nuts to sell to aspiring Luthiers who in my experience are some of the cheapest, I'll make my own.... SOB's that I've ever been proud to be one too.

If SM were to disappear I'd be much worse off in actual $ terms.

For me, located outside of north america, SM are an OKish-priced source of all kinds of specialist things that I'd otherwise have to get from a multitude of different suppliers. Their prices have definitely gone up over the past decade that I've dealt with them. Now, as Hesh says those other suppliers exist and can be found and often the items are cheaper BUT then I'm paying international shipping, import duties etc from six different suppliers. Ends up a lot more expensive ...

With SM, I get can get most of it all in one place, shipped to me at the same time in one box. And their stewmax membership makes international shipping free (!!!) for a pittance of a membership fee. Lets me adopt a kinda half-a$$ed 'just-in-time' system for my little shop, where I no longer need to carry a lot of stock of consumables... monthly smaller orders keeps things ticking along. I couldn't do this before they expanded their stewmax program to international customers.

So OK the tuners, bridge pins, pickup springs, guitar strings, etc are a little more expensive than elsewhere but in the end SM saves my (very small) business thousands a year.

Sad about their new site; it's slow and their ordering software is struggling at times. Just yesterday I was unable to place an order due to server issues at their end. Hope they sort it out.