What limits can a customshop put on their lineup

[Ace Flibble]

• Again, lots of great points. I'll try to talk about the points that stuck out for me
  
  Bareknuckle Pickups.
  
  That's kind-off a necessity. BKP and SD are able to promote us on their social media and the use of a bigger name who sort-off 'sponsors' us that way goes a REALLY long way to affirm us as a brand. Fralin and Lollar make great pickups, but what I want,  I can get from SD or BKP for less than with those guys, sorry

• Your business, it's fine, but if I may, I'd like to slightly expand on what I meant before when I brought up BKP, which really comes down to two points:
  1) There are other UK boutique pickup manufacturers who cost literally half what BKP do, including trade prices. Every other brand also is more willing to do full custom stuff—which really is the whole point of going to a boutique company—and offers a wider range of products to begin with. Three of them—Oil City, Catswhisker and The Creamery—are all building names rapidly, only a little behind BKP in terms of size and recognition within the industry and among professionals. So, simply from a business perspective, BKP doesn't actually offer any advantages; other companies can get you a better deal.
  2) Tim from Bare Knuckle is kind of a dickhead. The original BKP forums were scrubbed a few years ago after people kept bringing up his homophobic, sexist and generally elitist remarks, and he got found out and called out for making fake reviews and claims against rival UK pickup manufacturers. (Swineshead were completely put out of business thanks to his unfounded badmouthing, including claiming they were generic models made in China.) He's done a good job of cleaning up his behaviour since about 2011, and the pre-2009 boards were wiped clean, but anybody who was around the UK pickup companies of 2005-2008 still knows of and can fill you in on the details and his reputation. So, morally it's just not a nice company to partner with, and of course from a business perspective it's not a great idea to get in bed with people with that kind of history.
  
  So, yeah. I get that BKP have the name. But if you've got Seymour Duncan on board for that, BKP aren't going to add much that wouldn't be covered—cheaper—by other people. I know you've been on the SD blogs a lot, too, so from my point of view it makes more sense to specifically use Seymour Duncan only; double down on that connection. Of course it's also cheaper to only offer one line of pickups since you can buy in job lots, which you can either use for a bigger profit margin or you can pass the saving on to your customers and make your builds more appealing to their wallets. But if you do want to offer boutique pickups as well, those are the reasons why I previously said to ditch BKP and go for literally any other brand.

 

[Orpheo]

• Again, lots of great points. I'll try to talk about the points that stuck out for me
  
  Bareknuckle Pickups.
  
  That's kind-off a necessity. BKP and SD are able to promote us on their social media and the use of a bigger name who sort-off 'sponsors' us that way goes a REALLY long way to affirm us as a brand. Fralin and Lollar make great pickups, but what I want,  I can get from SD or BKP for less than with those guys, sorry

• Your business, it's fine, but if I may, I'd like to slightly expand on what I meant before when I brought up BKP, which really comes down to two points:
  1) There are other UK boutique pickup manufacturers who cost literally half what BKP do, including trade prices. Every other brand also is more willing to do full custom stuff—which really is the whole point of going to a boutique company—and offers a wider range of products to begin with. Three of them—Oil City, Catswhisker and The Creamery—are all building names rapidly, only a little behind BKP in terms of size and recognition within the industry and among professionals. So, simply from a business perspective, BKP doesn't actually offer any advantages; other companies can get you a better deal.
  2) Tim from Bare Knuckle is kind of a dickhead. The original BKP forums were scrubbed a few years ago after people kept bringing up his homophobic, sexist and generally elitist remarks, and he got found out and called out for making fake reviews and claims against rival UK pickup manufacturers. (Swineshead were completely put out of business thanks to his unfounded badmouthing, including claiming they were generic models made in China.) He's done a good job of cleaning up his behaviour since about 2011, and the pre-2009 boards were wiped clean, but anybody who was around the UK pickup companies of 2005-2008 still knows of and can fill you in on the details and his reputation. So, morally it's just not a nice company to partner with, and of course from a business perspective it's not a great idea to get in bed with people with that kind of history.
  
  So, yeah. I get that BKP have the name. But if you've got Seymour Duncan on board for that, BKP aren't going to add much that wouldn't be covered—cheaper—by other people. I know you've been on the SD blogs a lot, too, so from my point of view it makes more sense to specifically use Seymour Duncan only; double down on that connection. Of course it's also cheaper to only offer one line of pickups since you can buy in job lots, which you can either use for a bigger profit margin or you can pass the saving on to your customers and make your builds more appealing to their wallets. But if you do want to offer boutique pickups as well, those are the reasons why I previously said to ditch BKP and go for literally any other brand.

I know and I can't disagree. But customer demand kinda forces my hand in this case. Even non-standard SD pickups, heck even pickups I designed but were build by SD are hard to 'sell'. They say, nah gimme a JB. Even when my pickup does exactly what they want, they'd still rather not have that one. I don't get people sometimes.

 

[mayfly]

I know and I can't disagree. But customer demand kinda forces my hand in this case. Even non-standard SD pickups, heck even pickups I designed but were build by SD are hard to 'sell'. They say, nah gimme a JB. Even when my pickup does exactly what they want, they'd still rather not have that one. I don't get people sometimes.

that last sentence nails things!  People are very strange and unpredictable and funny.  I know full well how that goes.  Reminds me when people thought that VOX AC30's were 'class A'.  Well, they are not.  And neither were my amps.  The engineer in me made me tell people the truth; that they were cathode bias class AB (and that's really what made them sound that way.  Well, that and no feedback loop and a bunch of other stuff - but I digress).  The problem is that sometimes it's really hard to educate your customer base, especially when competing brands are trying their best to un-educate them to make their brand look special.

My advice regarding BKP - stick with them if that's what the customers want.  Until you have a name for yourself.  Then ditch them and tell people why, and why SD is as good or better.  You can only educate your customers once you have a reputation.

my $0.02 

 

[Ace Flibble]

This is why, when I was getting into the guitar manufacturing game, I kept my humbucker options to the JB/59 set, double Alnico II Pros and the EMG 81 and 85. I would have liked to have educated people on the virtues of the Pearly Gates, Custom Custom or the 60A, but alas, nobody cares for other pickups so it wasn't financially viable to offer anything different.
It's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy: people don't know about different, perhaps more suitable, pickups, so they don't buy guitars with different pickups. Because nobody is buying guitars with different pickups, guitars with different pickups don't get made. Because guitars with different pickups don't get made, people don't know about different pickups. Round and round we go.

Honestly, if Gibson or Fender or ESP or whoever were to give me my own signature guitar to be mass produced, advertised and sold all over the world, I'd probably insist it came with some oddball combination like a Stag Mag and a Parallel Axis neck just so people would hear of them.

 

[Re-Pete]

I've never built up a business, but I guess you'd be keen to make every call a winner and get orders coming in. It must be tempting to do what the customer wants, but I guess you have to watch the bottom line figure and whether it is worth your effort to accommodate them.

From my view of having built 3 Warmoth guitars from parts with some non standard features (particularly the last 2), getting what you want as a customer is not always possible, no matter how 'custom' a shop may be. I later understood why Warmoth won't do certain things on guitar bodies, but at the time it seemed like a brick wall.

 

[Orpheo]

Strangely enough, pickups aren't that much of a problem with my customers. Yeah, they may not know that there's a pickup better suited for their needs and if they really don't wanna listen to the explanation and their ears don't help them, either, it's always possible to get a different pickup. No harm done.

The lineup now has been expanded, again, kinda forced my hand.

LP
*my own singlecut*
Superstrat
'strat'
Flying V (still in development)
SG

The hardest part isn't the body, it's the neck pocket. I need a few, you know. 24.75'', 22 frets + humbucker or singlecoil (since the neck pickup is mounted on top of the neck tenon), same for 24 frets, same for 25.5''. That's 6 templates. Right? No. I can reuse several templates for more than 1 goal! The 24.75 22 fret humbucker template is good enough for 25.5'' 22 frets single coil. So, yeah, that's the tough part when it comes to the 'logistics'. But the rest is still all interchangeable, that's why I'm not too difficult when it comes to body shapes. I can make a new body template in 2 hours, from start to finish. If the guitar is simple (i.e.: no carved top), the costs are reflected in that new design, it's that easy.

I always load up the demo guitars with odd ball pickups: PATB, SH6N, quarter pounders, etc. just the other-than-usual and a TON of hybrid humbuckers too. They simply sound better