Early Music Direct
The Opening Act
My involvement with helping out with Early Music Direct was the result of an unplanned visit by a friend one night. He’d come up to inform me that he’d been asked to help out with a new venture from one of his Grandfather’s long time friends, a man by the name of Richard Wood. It turned out that Richard has been heavily involved with the early music scene in the UK for decades, if there was something or someone in the UK (and abroad) who was a known entity within the field, you could almost guarantee that Richard would be aware or involved with them in some way. He could also count renowned composer Richard Harvey (The Lion King, Interstellar) as a close personal friend, who I was informed was interested in helping out with this new venture in some small way.
As my friend got involved with meetings regarding business strategies, my name came up as someone who could potentially help with various aspects of this venture as it sought to carve out a niche and expand to stocking different types of instruments. After being briefed on the plan and the current trajectory and planned projects of the business, I was happy to formally accept a role helping out with the many different aspects and tasks of this exciting venture.
While in the end things didn’t take off quite to the extent that Richard and the whole team in general had initially hoped, due mainly to unforseen circumstances, everyone involved certainly learned a lot from this endeavour, and indeed, many of the struggles I encountered while engaged in this project helped me in other areas of my working and personal life. Afterall, the cold frigid grip of failure can often be a far better teacher than the warm embrace of success. I’ve listed and elaborated on various points below in order to give a better understanding of what I was tasked with while working on this venture.
Striking a Chord
The business had existed for a small chunk of years before me and my friend joined on, spending this time selling sheet music and second hand instruments to customers via a website running on the Prestashop ecommerce platform. The operation at the start was to stock up on particular instruments from auctions, make certain needed adjustments and repairs, and then sell these items on the website to build a growing pool of capital to be used to expand online presence and get more unique stock in.
The main bulk of my time early on was to write properly formatted copy for the descriptions of the instruments from Richard’s notes, having to perform additional research where appropriate. As it became clear to me that the current photography standard was sub-optimal, I also became responsible for taking the images against a photography backdrop and editing them in Photoshop to as high of a standard as could be mustered given our limited photography resources at the time. Eventually, I was able to have a system going where new instruments that came in were photographed, described, and edited in a much cleaner and efficient manner, speeding up our output significantly.
After continuing on in this manner for around half a year to a year, we pivoted more to focusing on musical instrument kits that the customer may buy and assemble/decorate themselves. Despite not being early music focused, we ended up working with a manufactuer in China to also supply us with electric guitar kits. This was something that the rest of the team didn’t have much knowledge about, so it fell to me to decide on which models and styles we were going to stock. I decided on models that imitated Telecaster and Stratocaster style guitars, as well as a few more premium examples including one that mimicked the style of one of Steve Vai’s signature guitars. It was decided that these electric guitars would be sold both individually and as a bundle with a tuner and a small starter amp.
In addition to the electric guitars, we also ordered in kits for the following instruments: steel strung acoustic guitar, classical acoustic guitar, medieval harp, 22 string harp, medieval fiddle, 22” ukulele, 24” ukulele. We also had an agreement with Skrabl UK to sell their 1’, 2’, 3’, and 4’ portativ organs in a more drop shipping type of arrangement as we had limited storage space that the newly imported instrument kits were currently occupying.
When all of the above had been ordered in and had finaly arrived, work started on assessing the stock, devising a system for organising and tracking inventory, as well as having to take our own photographs of the kits along with all the editing and description writing that comes along with listing new product lines for sale on our website and on storefronts such as eBay and Facebook Marketplace. This was a particularly gruelling period as there were a lot of individual parts that had to be organised aesthetically in preperation for the images, and out photography area regretably hadn’t improved a great deal in the interim. There was also the need to write assembly instructions in an easy to follow manner, as the materials provided by the manufacturer weren’t up to our standards.
It fell to me to coordinate the various aspects of the business and ensure tasks were being completed, orders were being fulfilled, and teams were working together optimally in order to keep steady pace in moving things forward. After all was said and done, we had a decent stock of products listed online and ready for purchase by potential music loving customers. Orders would come in via our website and our eBay storefront, which would then be checked before being picked and packed by the warehousing team in perparation for shipping to the customer, both domestically and abroad.
Ultimately though, we did encounter some significant struggles over the years, these ranged from seemingly random and unwarranted account restrictions on our eBay page, high postage costs, and most unfortunately - various personal circumstances, culminating in stagnating progress and the eventual voluntary liquidation of the business.
Swansong
I was sad that things ended how they did, despite a good run while everything was operational we had some unfortunate setbacks that were both out of our control and a product of certain aspects/areas of the business not being implemented or managed as efficiently as they could’ve been had we the luxury of further time to trial and error to work out the kinks. Regardless of that, it provided me with a lot of valuable insight and gave an interesting “peak behind the curtain” so to speak, especially with regards to the various aspects of business management and strategy that I’d previously either had no idea about or only had a surface level understanding of. Especially illuminating was engaing in the marketing and market research of such a unique area of music that I had little understanding of beforehand.
These experiences will undoubtedly inform future decisions I make and ways I may approach new projects, some of things I would do differently should we ever get the chance to revisit this would be as follows:
- Push for a more fit-for-purpose photography area earlier on in order to spend less time retaking photos and editing in Photoshop.
- Worked further with the purchasing team to not over-extend the business early on with too many new product lines.
- Optimised products and offerings into more manageable packages in order to cut down on postage costs.
- Moved to a different e-commerce platform as Prestashop proved to be temperamental and rather clunky with regards to site management and changes.
Some of the lessons learned and knowledge gained while helping out with this curious endeavour has left me better equipped for success and aided in helping to avoid certain pitfalls in other major projects elsewhere, such as the creation of the new Henry Krank website as detailed here, among others. Even enterprises that don’t end up being greater than the sum of their parts are still valuable strings to any bow, ensuring that future efforts and projects are able to fully realise their potential through the benefit of prior experiences.
If you have any questions regarding the content of this article, or anything else you may find on this site, please contact me at maxingham@duck.com.