Official Luthiers Forum!

Marketing is my field and something I know very well and even taught late in my career.

Your descriptions of the possibilities are not what I've experienced and there are others here who hang theirs on a wall and have found walls. I didn't have any problem finding a wall and in fact found three. One I declined because they wanted an exclusive and they are nationally known. I never let anyone else control my future so I walked. The one I finally settled on was a Martin and Taylor dealer and my stuff successfully sold there with relative ease. My prices were considerably above Martin and Taylor too. But they were a GOOD market for me and my guitars as evidenced by every single one sold at times before it was completed.

And here is another example of how I sold mine. Another wall and this time in my repair shop. I hung them, when I had one that was not sold.... on my wall and repair clients inevitably would ask what's that. Then they would try it, then they asked if it was for sale, then they asked my my price and then they went home. I often heard from people later the same day. I had three want to bring a wife or brother and check it out again. I would let them know that time is money to me so sure come over but I don't have a lot of time to spend with you.

When I went looking for music stores, the wall so-to-speak I took a sample and did very little talking and simply handed it to an owner. One owner took me to his office and wanted the exclusive which I was against from day one. They also wanted a minimum number of units per year and that would rub me the wrong way too, this was not a job for me I was already retired and just a Luthier for something to do along with growing orchids, photography and rocking out in my studio with my guitars.

I still have people asking me nearly every month to build them one and I had one guy who was so pushy that I had to tell him to **** *** and then ban him from our shop. The friend who sent him my way I unfriended much like the mob does.... If you sponsor the guy you are responsible for him.

Look YMMV and I get that but I also get as I just said that not everyone's experience hanging out the shingle is going to be the same. As a repair luthier I already had some trust of my clients and may have actually helped them and exchanged coin prior. That doesn't hurt to be somewhat established as a legitimate business that will take a credit card and even give it back, sometimes... Please note attempt at humor rirhett and please also note that I appreciate your comments but we are in disagreement here no biggie though. My world is about making things happen not stating that they are not possible or available.

I always will believe that there are things that can be done to improve our possibilities of marketing our stuff. When I was 16 I got fired from a job, felt terrible, then got mad, applied for another job on the way home from being fired and got a better job.

That's me, this little story, I never give up as evidenced by the fact that I am still on the OLF with very little value coming my way except once in a while from some of the other repair luthiers. I also would like to have fun here and not have people be defensive when they encounter someone who's experience has been different AND is actually experience too in walking the walk not just talking the talk.

Not to get off topic but until you have been a professional repair Luthier you just can't actually relate to what my world, Chris's world, Dan's world might be like. People come at us will all manner of crap and prior hack work. I often joke that these people only like us when they need something (I tell my own doc that too ). I would liken the knowledge that I required to build guitars to be a very small fraction of what I have to know to successfully repair a Rik 12 or a Martin 13 series with the bolt-on neck and internal intonation adjustment with aluminum blocks in the neck joint. It goes on and on and on from Floyds and how to block them for string changes to Lowdens and why your pup choices are very limited. But I digress.

So finding a wall was not difficult and yes there are fewer walls making this an even BETTER opportunity in my view. As the world more and more can't satisfy their cravings to go to an actual brick and mortar music store and scratch up all the pretty guitars with their belt buckles.... they also value the experiences even more now than ever. Scarcity sells. And like the kid that at least I was with an allowance burning a hole in my pocket while in a five and dime store... they often are compelled to not leave without satisfying their GAS (guitar acquisition syndrome).

Terry Kennedy has also sold successfully for years affiliated with a store and there are others here too who again had no issues finding the wall/store and make money with the relationship as a result.

As for being a curmudgeon watch out my friend you've just met another one. Getting old is a mixed bag. As Leonard Cohen wrote and sung "I ache in the places that I used to play" but on the other hand I can get away with more because people simply chalk it up to Hesh has become a geezer.

Wanted to add one last comment unless I am addressed again. With any successful endeavor there is a tendency with some to become arrogant and know-it-allish as they celebrate their accomplishments. I never felt that way as a builder but I do now feel this somewhat and have to fight it as repair luthier. Stuff is easy for me now and I can usually accurately triage a repair in seconds and have a mental plan of attack in a few seconds more. But truth be told there are countless other Luthiers who know far more than me. As a builder I produced well and good stuff. But in the world of repair luthiers the bar is VERY high with people such as TJ Thompson and my business partner Dave Collins who Dan E. asks advice from for fret work. I met my match and don't have enough time left to compete with those guys.

But if I did.... I would....

Thanks for your comments and can we be friends now rirhett?

Back in the 2000's when I was doing repairs for 3 shops, all of which closed down, I hung one of mine on the wall. About a month later I was horrified at how scratched up it was. People sure did love playing it. I said to myself never again.

After the 'great close down' one shop in my area did finally open up and has been around for at least a decade now so they seem okay. They sell Martin and when I went in there once months ago there was a small shop luthier guitar on the wall. It did not have the fit and finish of the Martins and when I picked it up and strummed it, it didn't have the tone of a Martin either and it was going for the same price. So that's a whole other story.

People buy with their eyes but it's got to sound good too.

I think there is some marketing economic principal of which name I have forgotten that suggests that when things are ridiculously high price they are actually more attractive to people. So I would even suggest if you are going to hang one on the wall price it way higher then a Martin. In the end what have ya got to lose? But the mindset there is that this guitar is special, how could it not be? Look at that price? But you will want to have that fit and finish and hopefully no punters will scratch it all up.

When I started building in the 90’s John Greven was starting to use the initially popular water based finish KTM-9 and applying it with a foam brush. His write up in the old LMI catalog was just one superlative after another.
When I went to the Guild meeting in Tacoma in 2003 he gave a seminar with Mike Doolin on the finish and both were giddy with excitement about how great it was. I used it on several instruments.

Well we all know how that turned out. I never saw anything publicly from John or Mike when they quit using it. When John became excited about EnduroVar I was a little skeptical. Sounds like maybe it is decent.

A few years after I started building seriously I was lucky enough to get into a high end store, The Podium in Minneapolis, and for 14 years sold off the wall next to Martin, Collings, Bourgeois, Kopp, Huss and Dalton, etc. It was a fantastic experience and they took great care of my instruments. I got lucky.
When I first went there they liked my stuff but told me any waterbased finish was the kiss of death in that environment. I showed my guitars to Jim Olson and he said exactly the same thing.
I started outsourcing to Addam Stark for nitro and later Tony Ferguson for Catalyzed Urethane. Worth every penny for sure.

Now sadly The Podium is closed after 60 plus years of business and there are really no high end acoustic guitar stores in the Twin Cities. Not surprising as I have become good friends with three former owners of that store and none of them said they ever made any real money to speak of selling expensive guitars. Accessories and gear kept them going.

I sold for a while off the wall in a violin shop that decided to open a high end acoustic guitar room but the guy figured out during the pandemic he could make a lot more money locking the front door and selling $3-400 Asian guitars and gear through Amazon Marketplace.

I am getting close to 80 and slowing down a bit so trying some of the products mentioned like EnduroVar for a shop friendly finish for certain instruments is appealing and very interesting. I will probably continue to outsource spec guitars though. I was a little nervous about switching from Addam’s nitro to Tony’s catalyzed urethane but count me in as a big fan.

Great thread! Thanks to everyone for their input. Finishing can certainly be the most challenging part of building.

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

House keeping first so I'm apologizing to Glenn for this going off track a bit, not totally since the marketability of your guitars and the finish you choose are in my experience very much related and I will not relent on this. Builders should choose a finish appropriate for where the guitar will be a tool for musicians, period. If it's going to a gigging musician tough finishes are desirable for most, not all.

Glenn and I have been in contact with PMs and he's OK with me sharing that I don't think that any waterborne finish is what I would have ever gone to market with. Search the archives for KTM9 and see how for nearly a decade that finish dominated this forum and was the cat's arse to those who felt like they could do this a little bit and not subscribe to conventions that were arrived at by those before us with vastly more experience than us.

So Greven may have used this EM6000. Mike Doolin used KTM9 and even promoted it and five years later he switched away from it. Mike is playing these days but not building per his web site. Thanks to Mike too for demystifying epoxy pore fill for me and saving my participation in Lutherie with a pore filler that worked for me, finally...

But y'all choose whatever finish you wish, that's up to you and I'll say whatever my beliefs are and that's up to me, always.

So JF I have to ask when your guitar was scratched up in the store what was the finish you used Forgive me please this is a natural question in the evolution of this thread which led us to retail music stores. The music store I used had little yellow signs that say "Please ask before trying a guitar." I still have one of the signs in my shop here in my home. My stuff was never scratched but I also used conventional, tough finishes and my stuff usually sold in a few weeks and was gone.

Yes you are speaking of the study of "buying styles" and how people are psychologically motivated to purchase what they purchase. Some people do indeed see higher priced stuff as having to be better and in some instances they are less interested in the utility of the item and more interested in the perceived "status" that they will receive from driving that BMW or whatever. Not always of course but some people just want really nice things and I tend to be one of them.

I'm never disappointed with what I purchase and I consider the price to be incidental to the value and utility. Typing this on a Mac which some of you will push back and say they cost more. I have a Mac in the other room that is 12 years old and I can still do everything I do except Photoshop on that thing and it has never failed, not even once and no viruses. I paid more but I got more and that's how I hope things may work.

Now not to throw one more severed head in OLFer's laps here like Col. Kurtz in the greatest film ever made, that year... Apocalypse Now when I determined my pricing it was a combination of several things all very important to me.

First I did not consider myself a know-it-all hot shot because I could make a pretty and good sounding guitar. I held on to the idea that this, Lutherie was not my life or main gig and that I was a stranger in a strange land here.

With this said it was very important to me being a marketing guy who is very much into value and what that means to price in a manner that did not undercut or be disrespectful to the REAL luthiers of the day who make their livings doing this. I always was against those who will sell a guitar for peanuts or maybe what they had in it for two reasons.

Regardless of what you sell for if the idea is that you are not fully competent and as such charge less I would not sell at all. I gave away some prototypes to Serge and two others with the idea that all I want is data. Call me up in six months and tell me how she's doing. Find me five years later and tell me how she's doing.

When you sell for less because you are new at this you are also tacitly telling your client that you are uncertain as to if your stuff is any good. How the hell are they supposed to covet and value it if you don't???? That is NO way to go to market and it also leads to the nightmare of that guitar changing hands and someone flaming you on the Internet when it is abused and falls apart and you have to put up with all of this for your sunk costs.... Not smart in my view.

There is a reason why when Gibson employees here in Michigan were permitted to build their own employee guitar that they could not be serialized or have the Gibson name on them.... Gibson did not want to get any of this on them.....

OK so I wanted to be respectful to those in the trade already and price around their pricing.

Next I priced high compared to most here because I did believe in myself and I lived this stuff near 24/7 including trips to the U of M labs to work on bridge designs and such. I used only the very best materials I could find which is why Colin Symons got so upset when I bursted a master grade Adi top.

And lastly I priced high because I know how to do true cost accounting.

When you price your creations if you are going to be honest with everyone and yourselves you should use your true costs. This incudes everything including paying yourself a decent wage. Even so I found myself working for less than a dollar an hour building guitars and averaging a $5,500 each for them with some up to $7,500 and some, one as low as $3,500.

Dave Collins and I once did an exercise in cost accounting and found I was making a bit less than $1 an hour building because I would put in 140 hours on average in every one and I do tend to work very fast too.... I'm just very detail oriented and will not let something leave if it's not near perfect.

To summarize respect for the Luthiers already in this market, my true costs and a belief in myself which included having been a Six Sigma certified manufacturing engineer I believed that my stuff had earned the pricing that I went to market with.

So did my customers.

And they sold and sold until I was bored to death with it.... What are ya going to do.

Anyway that's my story. When I get around others who have made their livings in this trade for a long time my story is not all that unusual to them and I tend to get along with those folks who not many are here now very well. I respected them from day one and even ate **** here when I was new because I respected folks (and still do and always will) like Rick and Mario AND I knew and still do that there is always, always more to learn. I did push back too early on but found it counter to my own goals and frankly futile.....

So as a general comment and this has nothing to do with JF just because you can make a guitar in my view you are a guitar maker not a Luthier. I know Websters does not agree with me but to me a true Luthier is more of a generalist but highly experienced and can go from a Rik 12 to a Mandola and not think it's the former prime minister of South Africa. He was a great man too, eh but I digress again.

If you sense that the gloves are off you are correct I share what I believe and if you can't handle it don't read my stuff. I feel like I am channeling Chris Pile Love ya buddy!

People come to us because they don’t want Martin/Taylor/Gibson etc. Otherwise they’d just buy one of those.

Anyway, FWIW…I sprayed a post cat Royal Lac guitar and it turned out mostly fine, all problems operator error. I’ve seen the instrument many times after and its holding up just fine, and it gets used and gigged with a lot.

A friend of mine is getting a 1.5mil coat by padding it on, I think it has a lot of promise. His guitars are selling at the multiple tens of thousands level to very finicky discerning players through the big high end shops, its obviously acceptable, and accepted.

Hesh I believe that guitar was done in KTM-9

I too went with the Greven article in the old LMI catalog and started using KTM. Live and learn.

None the less I have nitro guitars that are scratched too. I do love nitro. It's probably my favorite of all finishes. It was fine when I built two guitars a year and could wait for the nice fall dry weather hear in the Appalachians. But now I need to get stuff done year round too.

Speaking of scratches and finishes though. After switching almost exclusively to FP years ago I came to the conclusion that a finish that doesn't scratch is detrimental to the tone of the instrument.



<runs and hides>

Oh! So that's what they mean by "Scratch Built" ?

So, what was the problem with the KTM-9? I did only one instrument with it and didn’t like it, so never did another. But it looked great and was quite hard. So far, it seems to be doing fine. What problem did the other users have with it?

Now there is no way I could have known that

Regarding FP it's tops for sure sonically I completely agree. My player here, acoustic is all FP shellac and thin too and it's the best sounding instrument I own, acoustic. I love the look too it's just not all that durable if it needs to be.

You know I wanted to do KTM9 too and even bought a can and then stopped using it because of some of the posts of problems here.

Remember Michael Dale Payne? Sure you do he was our resident OLF expert on KTM9. He bought my can and I never tired it. I wonder how Michael is, has anyone heard from him?

I just had a conversation with Dave Collins and he said for the 30 years he's been a Luthier every five years someone rolls out a new, best ever.... waterborne finish and every five years the reports of not being ready for prime time start rolling in.

Guitars are a very harsh, demanding and changing environment for a finish. We have all manner of frequencies vibrating, sweat, hand oils, booze, Clapton's smokes, hot, cold, wet dry, drops, impacts, many woodworking rules being broken all married into something that we want a finish that will be sonically transparent, environmentally friendly and stable, tough and durable, safe, cheap and easy.

We don't ask for much now do we

Me thinks that there really are not great choices for guitar finishes it's always going to be like intonating a Tele where you have to balance precision with having to use one saddle for two strings.

Howdy Bob: Do a search of the archives for "KTM9" I did last night and there are pages after pages of people reporting issues in time. I don't have what I like to have to comment further, personal experience with it so I would refer you to the search results. Lots of problems and it's no longer on the market either as far as I know.

KTM-9 had a tendency to bubble and blister where your skin touched it.

KTM-SV however, did not. It was easy to spray, sand, and buff. It had no blueish cast, another trait of WB finishes.

It seems to continue to shrink like nitro too. You can see the grain lines raised through the finish in the reflected light on the top. I got OK with it, but then got the OK to have my guitars finished at work so there was no point doing it myself anymore. Have contracted out the few gloss coats I’ve had orders for in a variety of finishes, and its quite surprising how different the different finishes sound.

Not sure if its still around…

Yeah the bubble blister problem I had too. I had a guitar come back after about ten years for a bridge lifting and I was horrified by the way the finish looked but the owner said it was his favorite guitar and even sold his Taylor 810 in Koa after he had mine for about a year because he never played it any more. Yes yes i know a pat on my own back. But man! He was nice about it but most people would have been very upset by that look.

But mostly I did not like the KTM, or any water base that I tried back then 90's-00's era, was because of the milky white lack of clarity.

Yep, the SV (spar varnish) was the only one I tried that didn’t have it. Haven’t tried EV or EM6000. I prolly never will cause PCRL seems pretty ideal…

I've never seen spruce with so much silk that it looks like shredded wheat! I mean that in a very good way, even though it sounds odd.

Special wood is one of the things a scratch builder can offer. With a varnish that doesn't hide, but sets it off.

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Beautiful results!

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

That was my first impression... That top is beautiful and it really pops. It does look like a crack in the pin holes tho?

Good eye.

I used to have access to some pretty nice spruce, lol. I could buy from the 05-09 pile.

Yep, cracked bridge, but, I have a tendency to treat my guitars exactly how I warn clients not to.

LOL! I do the same. I figure I can fix them if something happens

Not expendable, exactly…but almost.

That crack is an easy fix and again sorry for being off topic. I know most of you guys know this but for those that don't pin hole bridge cracks are common and easy to fix.

I quad fold a small piece of 320 paper so it's stiffer and flatter and wick thin CA in the crack and immediately lightly sand the top of the bridge with the 320. The dust fills the crack. It usually takes me two times doing this to fill a crack. Be sure the glue has cured before putting the pins back in

It may show as the sanding debris and dust will be slightly lighter in color than the bridge wood. So not for a pre-war Martin but for most others it's a 2 minute fix and it holds and holds.

Lastly this kind of crack can at times be a common tell tale of the bridge plate wearing where the string balls hit it and a need for a bridge plate cap. As the string balls migrate up the pin holes in time and with wear we keep pushing the pins back down and that may cause this crack. This is a very common sight on 70's Guild D-25 and such as those pins always bend and let the string balls migrate up the pin holes.

A dry guitar may crack across the pins too and may be an additional causation that needs attention.

Now back to your regularly scheduled program.

* Please note this method has to be appropriate for the instrument and is great for guitars where a bit of a line if you look close enough may show.