EMD COMPANY PROFILE
“A lot of places don’t get it. Retailers come and see us at Frankfurt and go ‘why aren’t we doing this?’” Robinson adds. “Yet, they won’t change what they’ve been doing for years.”
MISPLACED PERCEPTIONS The low prices in the Stagg catalogue might cause many to assume they’re inferior products, but in reality many of its lines are capable of competing in terms of quality with products that can be found further up the scale from the entry level. “We get a lot of people coming from
overseas and go around Denmark Street and see it’s full of Stagg. They’re clearly surprised, but the cymbals, for example, have been hugely successful in recent years. They’re now the UK’s best seller,” he points out. EMD’s sales are not the result of some industry secret, it’s actually very straight forward. “If the product’s good and value for money, people will buy it, it’s as simple as that. The brand name isn’t so important. We get enquiries from artists about possible endorsements every day.” Dealers that do ‘get it’ have the
advantage of not only stocking high-profit products, they can also get the hassle-free approach of dealing with one supplier for several lines. Rose Morris is a good example. The piano, guitar and percussion sectors cover a wide variety of brands, but brass and woodwind is made up entirely of Stagg products, which eliminates the problems that arise from using a long list of distributors. “Some dealers have 60 suppliers when they
could get almost all of it from one catalogue. It’s confusing and people end up haggling over nothing,” Robinson explains. The staff at Rose Morris were only too
the role of the road rep. Robinson can get orders sent straight to his phone, allowing him to go about his business from any location and at the same time keep in contact with clients. This might be a brilliant tool for keeping up to date with stores, but this style of relationship seems to have been taken even further at the next retailer we visited, Rose Morris. This store’s intricate and detailed stock and
ordering system doesn’t just provide the shop with superb levels of organisation, it has also given them the ability to strike up an unusually trustworthy relationship with Robinson, to a point where he actually writes his own orders for the shop. It is due to his knowledge of each store, gained from the effort put into visiting them more often and making more personal ties, that he has been given the privilege of accessing the system himself. Robinson likes to categorise the retailers he has visited into those who ‘get it’ and those who don’t. ‘It’, in this case, is the whole philosophy upon which EMD, and Stagg in particular, is based. To put it simply, stores that have taken on Stagg in bulk, across many lines, have been making money through the brand. Robinson reveals a situation he commonly finds himself in, whereby dealers seem to understand the benefits of stocking these products, but, frustratingly, are still reluctant to move away from the same approach they adopted decades ago.
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happy to offer praise for both the instruments and their salesman. “The Stagg brass and woodwind are great products and Tom is a great guy to deal with,” said the shop’s wind specialist, Beth Crome. After this it was off to London Pro Audio Centre, a shop that seemed a fan of Stagg’s array of cables, considering the selection on show here. EMD’s presence in non-traditional MI stores such as this underlines its status as a much larger distributor than many might be led to believe, but Robinson doesn’t seem to mind these misperceptions. “People don’t realise just how large and international EMD is. They still see us as a small company that does tambourines,” he says. “But we don’t look for loads of publicity. We prefer to stay out of the limelight.”
The final call, Rock Stop,
We do the basics well. Some of the big brands are
not as organised. Tom Robinson EMD
was another cable-related affair, where we met Jason Bryce, another individual who’s no stranger to the EMD catalogue. “They do everything you
want, it’ll be in stock and you’ll make money off it –
and that’s the most important thing. They’re deal breakers, too,” says Bryce, who is convinced that EMD has some kind of industry secret kept very under wraps. Robinson’s response is straight-forward. “We just do the basics well – admin, logistics,
organisation. Some of the big brands are not as organised. We just care for our retailers,” he said. A day with EMD, then, reveals a policy of selling
high-value product through close-knit dealer relationships, availability, problem solving and customer satisfaction… there’s no dark secret here after all. EMD MUSIC: 01293 862612
miPRO DECEMBER 2010 41
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