The Real Reason Ormsby Guitars were Delayed

追加: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]A couple of days ago, I released a video about Ormsby guitars, specifically talking about the delays that they faced with their production line of guitars, and I theorized that it probably had something to do with supply chain issues. A lot of custom parts, a lot of lead times. That was my theory, but it turns out that that's not the case. I sat down with Perry Ormsby and he told me the whole story, and you're about to see the call. Now, just a note, unfortunately, I had some technical issues which led to my microphone being very distorted, the audio file. Um, almost unusable. You can hear a little bit out throughout. But to try and make this a little bit more listenable, I went in and overdubbed what I was saying. And it's it sounds a little bit punched in, but it was uh the best way so that you could hear everything and it wasn't a distorted mess, which is kind of what it was. You can hear a little bit about it towards the end where I couldn't really save it. But um yeah, so if it looks like it's overdubbed, it's cuz it was. Tried my best. Okay, here's the video. Okay, so Perry, thank you for joining me here. We're going to talk about uh the delays of the production run of the GTRS, but I think we should start off with good news, which is that those delays are um relatively soon to end. You've got a date.

[00:01:22]>> We do have a date. We've got production in July this year, which essentially is, I guess, 6 weeks away to July. I don't have a date in July. Um it's hard to pin them down on exact dates. Um but we have a date. So we we have a month at least generally in the past we've seen production for uh let me think I'll give an example uh I think run six had 90% of the guitars made in 5 days which sounds pretty quick but um you know there's 200 people working there I don't know if there's 200 people there right now but you know there was 209 people back Um, so they can get stuff done pretty quick. Um, at the same time, we've also seen runs that took 3 and 1/2 weeks to produce and then another two weeks to finish off four guitars. So, uh, I I don't I don't know. I'm kind of hamstrung there. I don't really, you know, I can't really give a exact number, but they've said July. I know for a fact that all the the parts are there, the pickups are there, the pick guards are there for the Genesis models, the machine heads are there, the bridges are there, the bolts, the screws, the strap buns, all of the hardware is sitting there. It's there, the woods are there, truss rods are there, the nuts are there, all the parts are there. It's just cutting the wood, putting it into a guitar.

[00:02:49]>> Okay. Well, I suppose that's the good news that uh those who've pre-ordered Row 19, the wait isn't uh isn't too much longer.

[00:02:56]>> And as for shipping, like when once they release them, shipping used to take 3 weeks and 3 days. We have seen shipping take a bit longer. We just got a GTI shipment which comes from the World Music Indonesian factory. How long was that, Brett? 7 weeks.

[00:03:15]>> There was all sorts of nightmares on that. um container not getting onto the boat in time, having to wait for a new boat, a boat ends up going to Singapore, there's delays, has to go on a different boat, then gets scheduled onto another boat, gets here, gets earmarked for quarantine inspection, that takes a week, uh which sometime most of the time it just goes through. So, you know, the shipping I think the longest it's ever taken from Korea is 4 and 1/2 weeks, but it used to be a predictable 3 week 3 days.

[00:03:47]>> Okay.

[00:03:48]>> We have seen longer than that, too. I've never seen it quicker than 3 weeks. So, >> okay. Well, um, so if we could go back in time, I suppose, to where the, uh, you can tell the story, I suppose.

[00:04:04]>> All right. Cool. Okay. So, we obviously have had troubles with production and all the way through with World. I think there's only a couple of runs that came in a week or two behind, but most of them have all run behind. And it's a lot of the time it is parts. Um, and it's because almost every part on our guitars is made just for us. The nut is unique, the pickups are unique, the base plate certainly, the magnets are a different length than normal. Uh, strap buttons are normal. Bridges have to be custom made. truss rods are longer by an inch.

[00:04:37]Um, you know, if we're putting carbon fiber rods into the neck, the normal ones aren't long enough. You know, we need to get them made longer and there's no ontheshelf supply of that kind of stuff. But in this case, that's not really been a problem. Um, the biggest problem is we, you know, as we grew the brand, we had a lot of demand and it's sometimes really hard to keep up with that and we really struggled with having hundreds of customers per run. Um, and we thought that, you know, okay, we don't want to be dealing with that. I don't want to deal with 250, 300 people per run and we've got three or four runs going in at one time. It's a lot to deal with. It's a lot of emails, a lot of communication, and it's a lot of stress to be honest because you got to get those guitars out to customers ASAP. And I don't want to rush all that kind of stuff. You know, it's important to do it all right. So, we did start taking on distributors after run or at run three.

[00:05:39]Um, we started off with one in the UK.

[00:05:42]Uh, we took one on in Japan. Uh, then we took one on in China. And then later on we took one on in Europe. And for the most part, everything's runs pretty smoothly with that kind of stuff. They place their orders, we bundle it all together, they get the guitars to ship direct from Korea and they handle all of the QC and we give them, you know, the the parameters that they got to stick to. Um, we had some problems with the UK distributor and we let them go early on.

[00:06:11]I think it was run six or somewhere around there that we decided it wasn't wasn't worth it.

[00:06:17]Um we have changed our Chinese distributor as well. We found that um most of the stores most of the orders were going from one distributor to another anyway. So we might as well just go to that final distributor. Um, but Europe Europe was our biggest and that was certainly accounted for at least 50% of all the guitars produced, which was amazing cuz we would just set up what we want, send out the details, take the order in, and everything sweet. Half the guitars we just get shipped straight there. Um, but that was all great. And then it was a few years ago now, we expanded on that and we were going to change the way we're doing the pre-orders.

[00:07:02]We were going to give only like four weeks for someone to put get an order in and we were going to do six runs a year and they were going to all be smaller runs but more often. And this is all stuff I've talked about back then. This is what we're doing. We're going to do less pre-orders or even no pre-orders.

[00:07:19]Most runs will not you won't be able to pre-order most things. Um, and that started around about run 14. We started gearing up for that. Um, we got to run 17 and that was the biggest run we've ever done. It was 837 guitars. Quite a big order for a small company. Everything was cool. We have a history of having all of our accounts paid real quick. So, I went and sent our bank account to World Music all the money's coming in in a week and unfortunately that did not happen. Um, we our European distributor needed to delay their payment by 7 weeks and that kind of caused a little bit of a cash pro problem. We got our run 17 so that's all cool. It's no problem there. But Europe was delayed. Um, they were also taking on other brands at the time and that didn't work out the way it was planned. Uh, I'm not going to talk about names of companies cuz I'm not going to [ __ ] all over them, but there was one brand that their entire order was entirely rejected and that causes obviously massive cash flow problems for a company and distributor and stores and whatnot. and we're coming in after that and uh I think the cash flow just dried up and we did agree to ship a less than a third of the order to get the guitars moving and once we've got that going then you know the stores can be sorted out and they can pay their bills and then 8 weeks later they're all paying their bills and then the money can come through to us and another third or whatever gets shipped out of Korea. But unfortunately, it got to that point where it's like, I don't think we're going to see the money. So, we ended that agreement with the European distributors and we then had a massive hole. So, we were fine for what we were doing, but we obviously had a lot of guitars sitting in Korea. And I've got some actual numbers for you. So run 17, uh, by the time we had what was left of the guitars that we were now no longer going to ship to Europe, but we are now have to take responsibility for, uh, we had a bill of about $37,000 to pay, which is quite a bit for a small company. Run 18A was another 48,000.

[00:09:56]Uh the Elite Goliath was another 44,000 that were abandoned. Uh and then there was a handful of Australianmade products as all up. But the total came to 430 423,600 which is a [ __ ] big number.

[00:10:13]>> Massive especially for a small company.

[00:10:16]>> Yes. Now um we knew that we had to commit to get this out. So first thing we did was okay by the time you realize that all this is happening months have gone past you know like when are we going to be get this money you know you're used to seeing it within a week it's now 4 months like what's going on you know you start talking to other distributors do you need extra stock now the markets turned a bit slow it's like ah [ __ ] what are we going to do you know so we had to commit to paying down that amount for guitars that we actually didn't have a requirement for and we're not going to be able to proceed unless we've done that. So, we did we did do it. Um what we did is first of all we asked for world music if they'd offer us credit and they had done that once before when there was a shark run. I can't remember which run it was. It was I think it was between seven and 8. We had a shark run and that came in straight after run seven and right before run eight and it's like we were at NM at the time and they just shipped the run to us and we paid it I don't know 5 weeks later or something like that. Um, so we said, "Look, can we can we do a credit situation where we get, let's say, half of what's there, get it shipped down here. We've still got all the other stuff being QC. We haven't shipped a lot of guitars yet. It's all going through QC.

[00:11:38]That's going to take a couple of months.

[00:11:40]We've got some spare stock. We got to sell that, too. Here's our plan. This is when we can pay you if you can ship those guitars now. It's going to take four or five weeks to get here, and uh we'll go from there. and they said no.

[00:11:54]Uh the reason they said no is because they had already had I'm not going to say the number, but it's well over a million dollars owing to them from other companies who'd offered similar deals and never paid them.

[00:12:07]>> So World had a blanket no on that. And I was like, "Okay, cool. All right." So the next thing we did is we went direct to stores in Europe and said, "Right, there's 70 stores in Europe, which is too many for a brand like us. Some of those are only stocking one or two guitars. Some are ordering three in a year. I think that mostly is selling to your mates, you know. So, um, we looked at that. We looked at which are the best six stores and we're going to only deal with those. That way, we're dealing with stores that have decent displays, 20, 30 guitars on display. Is a destination for the customers. You've got sales staff are fully equipped to handle those sales. They understand the guitars. They understand the specs. They're not looking up the spec sheet. they're fans of the brand. So, we started dealing with those six stores and um they'd already had their deliveries. So, they were in the first third of the run. So, okay, there's not much we can do there.

[00:13:03]Uh then we looked at, okay, what can we do to save some money to put that towards world music? So, we decided to skip two NAS. NAM is 45 grand every time. It's a lot of money. And I think you made a video about this. This NAM is just not the same as it used to be. We looked at it and went 45 grand. It's basically an ego trip.

[00:13:26]We can save 90 grand over two years by not going. Sure, that's going to kind of look a bit weird that we're not going to be there, but it's uh 90 grand and that's going to go a long way to paying a quarter of that bill. So, we committed to not going. We actually got a grant from the government to go to N. We had to pay that back as well. Um, we did start doing uh more regular sales and we did 20% off. We added in free shipping to encourage buyers.

[00:13:56]Um, we increase the output of our customs and our Australian production series. You've seen the Cassi get added, the Roxy get added. Um, so, you know, these are just things that whilst we're trying to get the money together, what can we do to to to do that? Yep. Cool.

[00:14:12]We can do that. Um, we did have an agreement with our European distributor on the Australian standards that they would be purchasing up to 200 a year and that's quite a bit of cash flow. So, all of that's gone too, right? But to do that, we also have to, one of our agreements was we had worldwide price matching. So, a GTR purchased direct from us, shipped to Germany, should cost within $50 of going into a store in Germany and buying something that's already got VAT on it, already got shipping cost to get there, already got distributor QC. And you would have probably have noticed that too with our guitars. It was no cheaper to buy from us direct, but we worked really hard at tiny margins to make that happen. And one of those things was we had to increase the cost of the Australian production series to make that work out in Europe. So we don't have that problem anymore. We can reduce the price of the Australian custom series back to or Australian production series back to where they originally planned to be. And I think that was was it 800 bucks Brett?

[00:15:19]I think it was about 800 bucks a guitar which immediately saw a massive impact in the number of orders we got. We plan to make 40 to 50 a year for us and, you know, up to 200 for Europe. Um, I think we did 80 the first year, 85. Then you got your factory customs. We're up to 101 Black Fridays, which is crazy, you know. Um, it's nuts that that same guitar has been made so many times. Um, or, you know, a variation of that guitar. Um, we also looked at, okay, everyone's doing BTOs.

[00:15:55]We're doing BTS. Everyone does BT stocks now. That's a thing. It wasn't a thing 10 years ago. It's a thing now. But when you be stock, you got a discount.

[00:16:04]Why don't we refinish some of these and make them into unique pieces that we can get a little bit more for? And how many have we done? 30, 40?

[00:16:13]It's a lot of work to refinish a guitar, but we did it. All this thing is just like we can pick up a little bit here and we can commit to like every couple of months sending some money to world, getting some more run 17s, selling them through. get that bill down. And it has taken quite some time. It's not quite two years, uh probably more like eight, eight months, but we've managed to pay that final figure down, which is a total of $423,600.

[00:16:44]Now, that final payment was arranged on Friday, about 6 hours before your video went up, actually. Um, and also on that day we received 50 GTI which we've been paying down as well.

[00:16:58]That was they were also in the in the list of guitars that were for Europe that just got abandoned. So, we've worked really hard and you know, it's embarrassing that this happened, but I'm pretty damn proud that we've made managed to make it happen. um seeing those numbers and thinking, geez, if I sold my house, I still can't pay the bill.

[00:17:22]You know, it's it's a pretty big hurdle to get across. But we've done it. Um one of the other things we did is in the leadup to uh run 17, we moved factories and we purchased a building because of course all this stuff happened at the 2-year mark. We could refinance. So we did. We refinanced. We took a loan out at 6% to get some extra cash um and sent that off to to world just to get that bill down as quick as possible. Look, we want run 19, etc. as soon as possible. I don't want the same guitars all the time. That's why we do so many different runs. I like seeing different guitars all the time. We've had run 17s coming out our ears for a long time now. And I'm sick of seeing Pine Line. I'm sick of seeing Icy Cool.

[00:18:11]Um, but we're at that point now where it's like it's that's all cleared up. So, it's positive moving forwards. It has been a hell of a delay. Um, and that sucks. Now, I do want to talk about the communication.

[00:18:29]Um, my wife is doing customer service and has been for about 7 months now. She used to be in the business back in the day. We had kids. She's gone and been a mom. She's back. There was a small period of time, six to nine months, where our customer service wasn't the best. Um, we we brought in someone from the factory floor cuz they know all the specs, right? It's pretty easy to rattle off details, but that doesn't make the best customer service person, and that's not their fault, right? That's uh it's just not their role. Their role is making things, you know, but my wife loves and excels at that. So when you speak to someone here, you're generally talking to her. Um I do want to go through the numbers on run 19 because although there is a huge delay, it's not it's not a huge problem. Um there were 47 guitars in total pre-ordered, right? 17 of those people have had full refunds or they've swapped to in stock guitars. That leaves 30 in total over the entire wait time.

[00:19:38]Um, of those 30, five signed on in the first month or five, sorry, in the first two weeks and they've been waiting that full time.

[00:19:48]Two of those guys have a guitar that they've purchased in every single run all the way back to run one. I don't think they care about the delay. Um 80% of the deposits we have are for $350.

[00:20:02]There was a period where we had a higher deposit amount because we were discouraging people putting a deposit down. We always said that we were moving to a no pre-order model, but we have to work towards it. We have a total of $14,400 in deposits for run 19.

[00:20:21]That equates to wages, workers compensation, insurance for fire and theft and staff taxes and superanuation and workers comp for 10 days.

[00:20:37]That's to put it into perspective. It's not a big number. I understand if anyone's wanted a refund. Our policy used to be you lose your deposit. We don't do that. People have waited long enough. If they wanted their money back, they could have it. We've never denied them that. Uh we always of course offer them, do you want to swap to something in stock and take it now? We could ship it out in 2 days. Most people take that option, but if they want their money back, they've got it back. And if anyone wants their money back, they get it back. The same goes for customs. We've had uh you know, there's people that wait in a queue for a custom for 9 months and don't see much work cuz we're not up to that order yet. They want to cancel, fine, go for it. We've also had people that never paid their custom bill and we end up with a custom sitting on the wall for 12 months while we try and work out what to do with this person's guitar, you know. Um, but yeah, that's the basic rundown, I guess. And, uh, you know, I know that there's comments that we're taking pre-orders to pay for the next run and the next run is simply not the truth. I can even go through the history of pre-orders for the last uh 10 or 12 orders and give some stats on that. It's just not the case. It's this is a small run. We want to go to small runs. We want to go to more regular runs. We want to push Australian production because then I have control over the whole thing. I love the GDRs. I think they're the best value for money guitar out there.

[00:22:09]But I I like making guitars, too, you know.

[00:22:14]Yeah, I suppose it's uh people often equate when there's a problem to other things that they've seen. Some other brands have done the whole Ponzi scheme type thing where they a pre-order to fund the previous one and that, but obviously if the run is so small.

[00:22:32]>> So, here's the thing, like a Ponzi scheme, you don't buy a factory.

[00:22:39]You know, you don't announce in your Facebook group that you finally bought your own factory and it's twice the size of the last one and here's us putting down epoxy floors and painting a Van Halen stripe around the edge. Um, you don't buy a paint booth worth 70 grand.

[00:22:54]You don't buy a forklift, you know. Um, I mean, I could take you for a walk through the shop if you want and you'd see we have hundreds of bridges, 1,200 fretboards already made. uh seven pallets of bodywoods. It's all there.

[00:23:11]That's not part of a Ponzi scheme. And I didn't wait 23 years. And we're at 9,700 GTRS now. We're just about to hit 10,000 guitars. They didn't do all of that to rip off 30 people.

[00:23:26]>> You know, like this is my kids business.

[00:23:30]You know what I mean? In in six years, my oldest son will be working here full-time. Maybe seven years, hopefully 10 years. But it's, you know, we're not going anywhere.

[00:23:43]>> What else am I going to do?

[00:23:45]>> I don't know what else I would even do like make guitars or go and live under a bridge, you know?

[00:23:53]>> Well, I suppose that's very good news for uh for everyone that enjoys the guitars.

[00:23:57]>> Yeah. And look, I just want to say on the communication thing, there's a lot of people that comment about lack of communication.

[00:24:03]I I don't know that we need to update non-C customers. Um, if anyone asks, we give them the rundown. Um, you know, there's not a single person that has reached out that hasn't got an answer.

[00:24:16]We give them the answer that we can give them. I'm not going to go into the nitty-gritty of what's in our bank account and when we're paying a payment to someone, but we give them what we can, you know, and when we expect that to the best of our knowledge. Now, of what we planned, there was a small uh delay in in in a little bit of it, but we've made up for that, you know, um you know, in our schedule of things, of course, was what I'm talking about. you know, when we said we'd do something, we didn't quite hit that mark, but we made up for it in the next month, you know.

[00:24:50]Um, yeah.

[00:24:52]>> Okay. Well, uh, thank you for sharing that with us, Perry. And, uh, uh, hopefully this puts, uh, everything at ease and, uh, those who are looking forward to their guitars are going to get them soon.

[00:25:05]>> Do you mind if I just run through the pre-orders that we've done in the past so people understand it?

[00:25:11]>> Yeah, sure.

[00:25:12]>> Yeah. Okay. So, run 14, you could pre-order that, but you couldn't pre-order the European exclusive colors.

[00:25:22]You couldn't order 14B, which was the same model guitar with different specs.

[00:25:26]And you couldn't or pre-order 14C. More than half that run wasn't able to be pre-ordered. It just comes in and then we sell it a stock. And we generally delay those guitars a few months to give people an opportunity to get the first batch. And then we released the the the colors that we've also had made at the same time. Run 15. Yes, you could pre-order, but you couldn't order the European exclusive colors. I think there was two or maybe three. You couldn't pre-order 15B.

[00:25:56]15B was three colors or four colors and you couldn't pre-order that. We purchased those. We get them all in at the same time. We wait till all of the pre-orders are shipped. We put up the spare stock and then we released 15B six run 16 exactly the same. Yes, you could pre-order run 16 but not the European exclusive colors and you couldn't pre-order 16B which was three other alternative hype colors and specs.

[00:26:26]Um I think there was five colors in 16 and then there was three that you couldn't six that you couldn't pre-order on top of that. Run 17 we did pre-orders for. Yes, 100%. And there was no extra B or C or or D orders on those. The Elite Goliath, you couldn't pre-order that until they were on the boat. They were on their way, you know. Run 18A was no pre-orders until the boat had sailed.

[00:26:52]18B, no pre-orders until the boat had sailed. Run 19, yes, you can pre-order, but you can't pre-order all the colors.

[00:26:59]There's other colors coming. There's other specs coming we haven't even told anyone about. You know, it's it's not a less than a third less than a on a on a massive run with a huge amount of pre-orders, only a third of those guitars are pre-ordered.

[00:27:15]>> It all just comes down to the the bad luck that you had with the uh European distributor.

[00:27:20]>> 100%. You know, when you're faced with this, you know, when you when you know, it starts off as, oh, it's 150 grand.

[00:27:27]Gez, like, okay, we got to work pretty hard. Oh, no, it's actually 300 grand.

[00:27:31]Oh, no. Because there's this order and this order that are already committed to being made. Oh my god, what about the GTI? Gez, there's there's 80 of those as well. That's that's a lot of money, you know, and it adds up and adds up and all of a sudden it's this overwhelming number. And I I'll admit I I thought, geez, if we just sell the house, the factory can be cleaned up. I can live in a little I can put a mezzanine in. I can live there. My wife's going to divorce me, though. But then, you know, I'll get to make more guitars. Um, but it's a big number and like, you know, you just got to do what you got to do.

[00:28:06]Um, you know, some people would probably fall down at that number. I just saw it as just another hurdle. Like guitar making's a hurdle, right? And, uh, you got to get to that end end goal and and you know, we're we're there now. We have no debt.

[00:28:26]It's it's it's all good. And if anyone wants a refund, they just ask for it.

[00:28:30]We've never denied that, you know.

[00:28:33]>> Okay. Well, I'm happy to hear that things are back on track.

[00:28:37]>> Yeah. Well, I mean, look, it's we've worked our asses off. I want a holiday, you know. Can't afford a holiday, but uh I want a holiday. Um but mate, I'm open to any questions like, you know, whatever whatever questions you have. I'm I'm an open book, but nothing to hide.

[00:28:56]>> Yeah. Um, well, thank you. Uh, I think you've covered almost everything. Uh, the only thing I can think of that maybe someone would would ask questions on, it was earlier on, it was a phrase that um, an order was rejected for a different company. That just means, just to clarify for someone that doesn't know that they ordered guitars, the quality control wasn't up to what they required, but they had already paid for them.

[00:29:24]>> Correct. And I can give you a prime example of where we have been in that situation. So, as you know, we've got the GTI GTI line, and that is supposed to be kind of, okay, if you've got a GTR, and your GTR is your favorite guitar, you want a backup, right? A GTI is a made in Indonesia, not Korea. It is made by WMI in their Korean in their Indonesian factory. You're going to be missing out on a couple of specs. You're never going to get carbon fiber necks or all that kind of stuff. But bang for buck, I still think it's a great guitar.

[00:29:56]We still do all the QC. The first batch we did of those we called GTX.

[00:30:03]If you've been around for a while, you'll remember that there was a GTX run. That was a run out of China. We got six prototypes or four prototypes. We took one to Nan. We got some favorable feedback on it. We gave the go-ahad to make 50 guitars.

[00:30:21]Cut the freaking, you know, got the jack recess in the back. They cut it on the front, not the back.

[00:30:29]Okay. Well, we can't accept that.

[00:30:34]So, they remade them. Um, what we received, look, we got pretty bad photos, but, you know, didn't immediately notice it in a photo. It didn't have bevels. It had round overs.

[00:30:48]So on the hype, you have the bevel on the back and the front. They were all roundovers. In a photo, you couldn't tell. It was a pretty They took that photo with a potato, I'm sure. Um, but then when we got them, it's like, geez, what do we do? We've actually paid for this. We rerouted all those guitars and resprayed them.

[00:31:08]Now, did we make money on that? Nope. We lost money for sure. But I personally resprayed every one of those guitars, all 50, to make them the right spec.

[00:31:19]Right now, that was a a way of us getting around a problem. Um, we then went to GTI production a few years later. First batch came out. They were the Ever Tunes and Innovation at the time. No one's ever seen an Everune with a multiscale. We're able to do stainless steel frets as well, which is a, you know, early on in Indonesian production.

[00:31:42]And I think not many were doing stainless steel frets there. Um, first batch were great. They sold out so quickly. We just couldn't believe it.

[00:31:49]Like, why didn't we order twice as many, you know? But it's a new thing. You never know. We'd play it safe. We ordered GTI. GTI 2 had already been ordered and they were hard tail standard scale. Can you pass me one second and just quickly show? Give me the green one.

[00:32:10]So, this is a GTI standard scale. I'm not trying to sell anyone. I'm just trying to show you what they look like.

[00:32:16]Hard tap. GTI 2 came in. There was one spec that wasn't quite right, but it didn't. It wasn't a run destroying problem. It's just like, well, actually, this is the spec. No one pre-ordered those, so it's like, okay, we can adjust the specs now. This is what you're getting. Um, GCI 3 came in and they were rat [ __ ] 140 guitars, Ever Tunes, so the hardware cost is high. Um, we shipped half to the European distributors. We got our half and it's like this is [ __ ] Um, I don't think we can even salvage most of these.

[00:32:58]They're things like um fret work's not been done right. So most guitars will need a ref. Okay, we can do that. We have a capability of doing that. We're a full custom shop. We can do that. But do we want to spend the time doing that? Um why is there fret problems? Is it because the woods aren't dried properly?

[00:33:17]Okay. Well, we can test that by just not touching them for 12 months, right? See what happens. We can take measurements and compare that to 6 months down the track or after summer. We can compare and see if any movement has happened.

[00:33:32]But it's little things like lacquer.

[00:33:33]It's not sticking properly on the edge of fretboards. They haven't conditioned the edge of the the the fretboard and therefore the lacquer is chipping off.

[00:33:40]Okay. Well, we can respray. But at what point are you chasing your tail on those sort of things? And I didn't really like the idea of doing any of that. There were 20 guitars we salvaged out of that run that we thought were good and 120 that got hardware taken off. We finally decided to go ahead with the Australian production cassis which going to have an ever tune. So now we've got all these ever tunes we don't know what to do with. Um we can reuse machine heads and um that's about it. Those guitars all got pulled apart. Um, and we're also considering chopping the headstocks off and making bookends or bookshelves because someone may get may as well get some joy out of this. But an example on that we got we did not get a refund. We got a discount by the time we those 20 that we salvaged and the fact that we can salvage the ever tunes.

[00:34:44]We're not even going to come close to it being even with the discount. But I've have to refund a customer, eg a European distributor. I have to refund them for 70 80 guitars. Um, but that's an example of it doesn't meet spec and it can't be easily, you know, a distributor's a distributor's role is not to make the guitars the right spec. The distributor is to make sure the quality meets a standard, give it a setup, make sure the neck strap, do any minor fret work that needs happening, check the electronics over, and ship it to a store. you know, um, your standard QC, but not reffring guitars, not fret, you know, fret leveling might even be a bit much for a distributor, although, you know, most of them do it. Um, but that it's not uncommon for an entire batch of guitars to be rejected.

[00:35:36]>> It's uncommon for us, but it's not uncommon when you hear stories, you know, and that might be a new model that was made wrong. Um, I know there's one brand out there now that just rejected 600 guitars.

[00:35:52]>> Wow.

[00:35:53]>> Or maybe wrong body shape.

[00:35:57]>> So, this is it all comes down to all these um these hurdles that you were saying.

[00:36:03]>> And I always wondered why when we go to world music which costs let's say you know 18% more than another factory in in Korea for example, right? I'm just pulling these numbers out of my head.

[00:36:17]How come we're retailing for a,000 bucks less?

[00:36:21]We're buying them for more. They travel further to get to us. I know we do more QC and we're retailing them for $1,000 less. What is going on here? And then you hear about Yeah. 600 guitars get rejected.

[00:36:35]Even if you're refunded on 600 guitars, you've still got shipping costs. You've got a 40 foot container insurance. It's lost profit. It's lost revenue. It's staff sitting around waiting for 3 months for another 600 guitars to arrive. And it's like, well, I kind of understand why some of these brands are so expensive sometimes, >> you know? Um, and you you kind of just got to look at how many guitar most guitar companies don't reveal where they're getting guitars made because they're swapping out all over the place.

[00:37:10]>> Yeah. you know, um we don't need to say names, but there's some that are on their eighth factory, you know, trying out all the different places.

[00:37:21]We're committed to world. We've always got a pretty high standard from world.

[00:37:25]Sure, there's some that come through that's we've got to respray or buff or whatever, but um it's just it is what it is.

[00:37:34]>> Well, thank you, Perry. It looks like our time is running short, but I uh want to thank you for uh coming on and uh giving us an indepth look at not just your business. It seems like the whole business in general and uh I'm happy to hear that those hurdles that you faced are uh in the rearview mirror.

[00:37:52]>> We're over it now. I'm pretty stoked with everything how everything's going.

[00:37:55]In fact, on Saturday, we went out to celebrate how we got over all this and then I got a message from a client, have you seen this video? I'm like, [ __ ] hell. We could have waited a day.

[00:38:08]Oh.

[00:38:08]>> But anyway, it's all good, mate.

[00:38:11]>> Okay. All right. Well, thank you.

[00:38:13]>> Now, we are going to N. Are you going to N?

[00:38:16]>> Uh, yes. I think so. Should be.

[00:38:18]>> I'll see you there.

[00:38:19]>> All right. See you.

[00:38:20]>> Going to Summit.

[00:38:21]>> Yes. Yes.

[00:38:22]>> See you at Summit.

[00:38:23]>> See you then.

[00:38:25]>> All right. Nor.

[00:38:27]>> Thanks, mate. Cheers. safe.