MI Pro

Take for example, Headline Music’s proprietor, Gavin Mortimer. A newcomer to the industry might look at Headline’s success with PRS guitars and think that Mortimer has ‘had it easy with a product like that’. If he did, he would be wrong, because Mortimer’s road hasn’t been without its difficulties. Prior to the establishment of Headline, for instance, he had run what had looked like a good UK distribution business with Washburn UK, only to have that go badly wrong. Then, having picked himself up and started all over again with Headline and PRS, he received another blow when, overnight, a major line – Ampeg/Crate – vanished, when the brand was sold.

St Louis Music’s decision to sell Ampeg and the rest of its lines to Loud Technology was one of the first rumbles of the recent bout of tectonic plate shifting in product distribution, the ramifications of which are still being felt today. You can feel it at work in, for example, Kaman selling to Fender, Sound Technology losing Taylor and Robert Wilson’s decision to buy Harman Pro UK.

You can see the same forces at work in Andrew Landesberg’s move into retail. Suddenly, the inherent insecurity of basing your business on a product you don’t own, has started to seem all too real.

But if Mortimer had been one of the first to lose a major line in an early bout of US corporate shenanigans, it neither sent him scurrying to add every spare line he could find, nor lose focus on PRS. Indeed, for a long while it seemed as if he wasn’t going to add any major brands at all to Headline’s roster. He picked up the US-made Lakland basses and Visual Sound effects, but he seemed in absolutely no rush to replace Ampeg.

And then, quite unexpectedly, came the announcement that Headline is taking over the UK distribution of Hughes & Kettner amplification from SCV. It was, to be brutally frank, perhaps not exactly the most exciting news of the year. It’s not that anyone with ears dislikes Hughes & Kettner’s fine products – far from it – just that Headline will be the latest in a long line of UK distributors to have tried to break the German brand into the UK’s first division.

So, what makes Mortimer think he can succeed where others have failed? “Okay,” he laughs, when the question is put to him, perhaps a little bluntly. “We also joke that we’re about the only distributor left that they haven’t tried. In fact it came about almost as a result of a comment like that to Paul Airey, at Hughes & Kettner, who’s been a good friend of mine for many years. I made a comment about when would it be our turn and he said ‘Are you serious?’ It took off from there.

“Let me say that I know this is going to be very difficult, but what attracts me is that I know the backup from the factory
is going to be of the very best, the products are world class and I think, if I may say so, that they have been under-marketed here. This is the European Boogie, in my opinion.”

Another man might say that there are plenty of European Boogies today and that the so-called boutique amp market is close to saturation.

“That’s very much the point. There may be lots of European Boogies but none with a massive factory and an infrastructure, which is what makes all the difference.
I’m not just talking about a big warehouse – I’m talking about strength and depth. What I have to look at is what I can bring to it, and the first thing to say is that we’ve done it before with Crate and Ampeg.”

But surely that whole success really rested on the dominance of a single product – the SVT?

“Not entirely. Crate, for example, was a dead brand in the UK, and we did £750,000 with it in the last year – albeit by giving it exclusively to Sound Control. Quite a lot of amp manufacturers would be very happy with that sort of turnover. On the other side, Ampeg was in a sorry state when we took it on. Everyone had had that, too, and there were huge quality and delivery problems, so what I did was commit to a production year and they committed to improve the quality. It took a while but, between us, we built it.

“It’s behind the scenes stuff that is paramount for a brand: repair issues, dealer service, backup, artist liaison – a lot of work goes into that and you have to have the backing of a manufacturer who is serious and willing to provide what you do need to do your bit.”

He goes on to give a series of examples of the way in which, when handling Ampeg, he was forever providing backup to touring artists. It is something a distributor should do, but not all seem to manage it. Mortimer’s point, however, is that the distributor simply can’t do it without backup, in his turn, from an organised and well-run manufacturer – backup he believes he will receive from Germany.

“These are the things that make a brand. I’m not saying no one has done it in the past with Hughes & Kettner, but I do believe that sales are the tip of the iceberg with a professional product. What you need to do is increase the artist pool and the way you do that is with service. The product is great, but almost everyone’s products are great these days. And it’s not just about the product, it’s about a lot of things including image and the image comes from the artists.

“If you develop a relationship with an artist only for him to find that he can’t rely on your products, those products will stay in the garage when he goes on tour – and that has happened to quite a few brands in the past, as we all know.

“This is particularly true of valve amps, because valve amps will go wrong. On that issue, Hughes & Kettner have the most detailed tube testing procedures I’ve ever seen – and I include the famous American testing houses. They test each tube for over 30 minutes in three different ways and if you get a good tube in an amp it will probably last.”

This, then, is the Headline master plan: to, as Mortimer puts it, “kill everyone with kindness”. Products will be right, support to endorsers second to none… So what about the retailers? Isn’t their reaction likely to be: ‘It’s a great product, but it’s a bit boring and if someone is going to spend that sort of money for a rock n roll product there are sexier brands’?

“Okay, I accept that would be a fair comment, but what we think we can add to change that is borne out of the relationship we have with our PRS dealers, which is a partnership based on trust. The ones that we work with really well know how we operate and that we are sales driven. We create a lot of business for them. We’ve always got marketing programmes going on, there’s always something happening to make PRS interesting and we intend to use the same method for Hughes & Kettner.
We will be generating interest in the product and we will be driving customers into the stores.

“We have three marketing plans to drive customers into the shops and we have a deal for the dealers. What we’ve found with PRS is that it works best with a dealer who really commits. It’s no good having four or five guitars – you’ve got to have 20 and the really good ones have got 80 or 100 and they are making amazing sales.

“Imagine if you walked into your local Porsche or Mercedes dealer and said you wanted to try model X or Y. If they hadn’t got a demonstrator, you’d be aghast and you’d walk away. I think this is the important part – if you are a Hughes & Kettner dealer, you are a Hughes & Kettner dealer and we will offer our dealers loan stock, credit terms, good margins and do our best to drive customers to them. If the customer doesn’t like the amp – well, there’s nothing you can do about that, but I’m confident about the products.”

Which may be true but, as any old MI soldier will tell you, this is a fashion industry and the gods of what is cool and what isn’t haven’t worked in favour of German-made guitar amps in the past. How does he plan to overcome that?

“Today’s generation of kids don’t care where a product is made. Most of your readers grew up in an era where America was best, Japanese was what you bought if you had to – then it was Korean – but now we’re talking about a new generation. My son is 20, in a band, trying to make it. When he was a teenager he was more interested in the brand that ran round his underpants than the label inside which said where they were made. That’s what it’s about today: the brand, not where it’s produced.

“Look, I know this is a potential problem, but the only way in which I will mention where the amps are made is from a manufacturing angle. I think everyone agrees the Germans know how to manufacture.

“I don’t think Hughes & Kettner is uncool, either. I think it’s a forgotten brand. It has an image among the heavy metal players, but not so much outside and I quite like that because I think if you asked ten guitarists ‘Have you tried a Hughes & Kettner amp?’ eight out of ten of them would say ‘no’. That’s what we need to change.”

Assuming a retailer reading this article thinks it might be an appealing prospect, is there an opening, or is Hughes & Kettner going to be fed solely to Headline’s established PRS dealers?

“We will be talking with everybody,” Mortimer says. “Our plan is to have 30 or so outlets, fully-loaded with the product, fully trained, and yes, it will go primarily to boutique dealers, because that suits the nature of the product and a lot of them are our friends from PRS, but the door is definitely open.”

Headline’s venture with Hughes & Kettner is one thing, but of course its mainstay is PRS. Presumably, particularly in the light of the recent controversy surrounding Gibson, PRS is, as they say, ‘having it away on their toes’?

“You know, Gibson’s approach is actually the right one – it’s just totally unrealistic for most products. Go back to the car analogy: you don’t catch a Mercedes dealer stocking Audis, but we’re not in that market and there are only one or two brands that could demand that sort of dealer commitment. The truth will out in a couple of years time, but it doesn’t suit our products.”

But isn’t he doing a similar thing anyway, by concentrating on retailers willing to stock 80 or 100 PRS guitars?

“We’re not demanding it – that’s the difference. I admire what Gibson is doing but it’s something I could never do.”

Maybe, but hasn’t it played right into his hands, with PRS? “Oh, I couldn’t possibly comment on that,” Mortimer says. Then laughs. “But I do think we have really got it right with PRS. We have a fantastic relationship with our dealers, we have a fantastic relationship with our factory and we’ve been the number one or two distributor in the world for the past ten years for them. We are so embedded in that company it is almost like there is no beginning or end to where we start and they finish, which gives us huge advantages. If I need something for an artist, if I need something for a dealer or an individual customer, I can get it done. My friends at the factory (and I do mean my friends) will do it for me.”

Is there any sense that PRS might have peaked, though? That it has got just about as big as it is going to get?

“Absolutely not. We are on a growth curve. Things plateaued for a while, particularly when there was almost a cloud over the company, during the ‘Singlecut’ court case with Gibson, but as soon as that was lifted it was like everyone stopped carrying a sack of potatoes around and we were able to get on with it.”

Probably rightly, Mortimer attributes the very ability of UK retailers to contemplate selling serious numbers of multi-thousand pound guitars to the PRS phenomenon. Before PRS, he says, a dealer might have sold a top-end Fender or Gibson and counted himself lucky, but few sold guitars costing several thousands of pounds, and even if that doesn’t take place in every music shop in the land, it takes place in a lot more of them than it did before PRS arrived on the scene.

For all that, there are many seasoned observers in the industry who maintain that the age of the distributor as we have known them has passed, that increasing corporatisation of major brands in the MI industry means no distributor can feel sufficiently secure to commit to a brand in the way that was once commonplace and remains necessary. Having suffered a major loss in the past, how does Mortimer reconcile that with maintaining that traditional business model?

“I believe you have to be really careful – and I’m talking to myself here – to remember that, in the end, it’s not your product and I have been guilty over the years of forgetting that. But if you add value, you will always be in work. If you tick all the boxes, the dealers will support you, sales will grow and you will be the distributor. You can’t avoid Gene Kornblum selling St Louis Music to Loud Technology and, when that happens, you just have to lick your wounds and move on to the next thing. People say that distribution is living on borrowed time, but I talk to my great friend, Jon Gold at Fender, and he says that he thinks it actually costs them more money to distribute their own products and the reason they do it is not to make more margin, it’s to control the brand from start to finish – it doesn’t save them money.

“I’m lucky because, being small, if something doesn’t work, I can change it in an afternoon and do believe there will always be a market for a distributor that adds value.”

Whether Gavin Mortimer and his team at Headline Music make a go of breaking Hughes & Kettner into the wider market which, based on product quality alone, surely it deserves, remains to be seen. Either way, Headline stands out as one of the UK’s best-focused distributors. And there is one other thing: if you ask around the retailers, Headline isn’t just successful, it is also liked. There might, just possibly, be another clue to its success there...
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