COVER FEATURE ROSETTI
much on the up again.” For any younger entrepreneur reading this
article and who might one day face a shock of that proportion, how do you carry on? What can be learned from Rosetti’s experience? “Various things have to happen,” Ellis says. “Number one is, when you’ve been looking after a very big company with a big product line, you have to cut your coat and we had to trim back quite a bit. “A lot – it was a traumatic process,” Barry
Warner adds. “We lost a lot of very good people and that’s
Canadian Michael Hunka (who older MI Pro readers may well recall) who had married into the Rosetti family and had skilfully guided the business, until he sold it to EMI in the late 1970s.
“I joined the Selmer shop in 1964 – I was
only three at the time – and I worked there for a few years, then had the only two years I’ve ever had out of the music industry,” Ellis recalls. “I disliked that intensely and then I was asked to go and manage the Sound City shop, in 1970, for Ivor Arbiter. Later, I was asked to join Selmer again as a director and when Norlin bought the wholesale side, I was asked to go there as sales manager for the musical instrument side – and it was there I met my dear chum and colleague, Barry Warner, in 1976.” “I joined them as finance director 1976,”
Warner adds. “That’s why we’ve been such good combination – because I wouldn’t dream of suggesting what we should buy and sell and Doug lets me figure out how we pay for it.” “We discovered early on that what works best is a two-way dictatorship,” Ellis adds. “Just as Barry says, rather than worry my head with all the clever stuff, my background was musical so I do the music bit, Barry did the clever bit and the company thrived.” Thrived it did, but not without a major hiccup along the way. The duo’s long association with Gibson, through its distributor Selmer and owner Norlin, had continued, both under EMI’s ownership of Rosetti and their own. But several years ago it became apparent that Gibson had some unique ideas about the best way to distribute its products and that individual distributors weren’t going to be part of them. The split with Rosetti finally came three years ago. It was enough of a loss to have finished many companies, but Rosetti carried on, not exactly without major lines (it had, after all,
22 miPRO MARCH 2011
not something we did lightly,” Ellis says. “We kept the pruning to a bare minimum but it was pretty severe. The good news is that we’re now on the up again, and we’ve just taken on another rep, Calvin Brown, which brings us up to four on the road.” The loss of Gibson wasn’t an isolated event in the UK trade and, coupled with Arbiter’s loss of Fender and a sudden spate of distributor- switching by some other leading brands, led some to speculate that the days of the traditional MI distributor were numbered – that the big brands would self-distribute and the volatility of the rest meant that it would be almost impossible to build a secure business. In response, some distributors (JHS, Barnes & Mullins notable among them) began developing brands of their own that they couldn’t lose – and that was a path also followed by Ellis and Warner, with their Adam Black guitar range. But has the Gibson experience led them to conclude that the role of the traditional distributor is, if not actually doomed, then not what you might call a safe business model any longer? “That’s a very interesting question and you
Rickenbacker, Vandoren, BC Rich and a cluster of other international names) but it must, surely, have come as a major blow? “We were actually one of the last distributors to lose it, because we had a very good relationship with Gibson – we still have, in fact. But eventually they had to go the way of some other large manufacturers and do their own distribution, which we quite understood,” Ellis says. “It was a product I’d loved for ever and I still have a reasonable collection of Gibsons which I still play and love.
“But we moved on because we had to and neither Barry nor I would deny that it was a huge blow. But since then we’ve found an awful lot of pluses to get the company to move forward and I’m delighted to say that we’re very
With Rickenbacker, BC Rich Hagstrom and Adam Black on the books, Rosetti still has a good grip on the guitar market
won’t be surprised to hear that it’s one Barry and I have asked ourselves fairly brutally. I think the role of the distributor is changing. There is still a role for us for certain products, but some of the largest manufacturers are clearly choosing to do it themselves. Not all of them, though. For example Rickenbacker, where John Hall has no plans to set up distribution all over the place – and there are other major companies who don’t want to do that, either. But, obviously when you have an impact like the Gibson one, you have to look to your own brands. We have a very strong brass and woodwind line under our own name and also we’ve been very nicely growing our own guitar brand, Adam Black, so much so that we are now looking for distributors of our own in Europe when we go to Frankfurt this year.” “You do have to bear mind that developing your own brands is a slow process and it’s expensive,” Warner adds. “But yes, the more you can develop your own, the stronger your basis.” Another development at Rosetti, and one that points to another direction distributors can take, is the recently announced sub-distribution collaboration with Stentor. What was the background to that? “The reason we talked to Stentor was because we have such a high regard for Michael Doughty and Rob Bogin,” says Ellis. “With those two guys, you shake their hands and that’s a deal, which is something that Barry and I have also fostered over many years. As to how it came about, a while ago I went to see Michael just to discuss things and what we decided to do was start a reciprocal sub-distribution arrangement, whereby Michael and Rob will sub-
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