There was a point where if we matched another retailer on a Gibson Les Paul standard, we would’ve lost £100 ish.
Now think how long you work with a customer who’s looking at spending £1600-£2k (quite a lot of the time people want talking through options and making sure it’s ‘right’)
That was pre “Gibson Europe” and Rossetti (Former UK distributor) used to run all sorts of weird and wacky buy 4 get one free type bundles - so nobody ever paid the same prices…it was mental.
But yeah, Fender, Yamaha and anything to do with recording - that was 5-15% margin.
I think we got up to 22% on fender, then they got done for price fixing 😏
The whole thing about “what’s your best price” and “how much for cash?” Just used to drive us mad - “Chuck us in a strap, some strings…you’ve got a deal; I’m spending £1500…sweeten the deal” - we would always be scraping through on next to nothing to remain competitive.
Its trying to have unique stuff that people actually want…we tried G&L as an alternative to Fender; we’d sell 30 fenders to 1 G&L…by which point, they’d been discontinued in a sale and we’d make as little as we did on the fender. Same with Tokai when we couldn’t make on Epiphone/Gibson.