a VIew From The IndusTry
LEE ANDERTON IS MANAGING PARTER OF ANDERTONS MUSIC, ONE THE UK’S LEADING INSTRUMENT RETAILERS
Did the 2017 CITES legislation take you by surprise? “We’d heard rumblings about it in October/ November 2016, but there wasn’t a lot of warning. The really big, organised suppliers had made some preparations, but they were in the minority.” Were there measures in place to help you deal with it, in terms of paperwork, process and so on? “This is where it gets really difficult. Any commercial transaction involving rosewood now requires an import and export licence. The exporter, Martin, for example, must obtain an export licence and the importer must obtain an import licence, that would be Martin’s UK distributor, Westside. However, you can’t apply for the import licence unless you have the export licence. When you add all that up, it can add four to six weeks to the whole thing. Plus there’s the cost: as I understand it, the cost of the import licence to the EU is £74. That might apply to a whole container of 500 guitars or a single instrument. If we assume that’s a similar value on the US side, it can add a lot of money to the cost of small shipments.
“It gets even more complicated. Certain territories, Indonesia, for example, haven’t fully adopted the scheme, so there’s no physical way of getting the export licence at this point, meaning you can’t get an import licence either. As it stands, nobody can get any Indonesian rosewood at all.” How does it affect a big instrument retail business such as Andertons? “We’ve seen big delays in shipments and deliveries. That might be because the exporters/importers don’t know who to talk to, or they might be completely on it, but it’s still taking time. And changes to product ranges are already happening. Taylor stopped using rosewood completely on the 100 and 200 Series as a direct result; Reverend and Chapman have stopped using rosewood, as has Fender on its Mexican-made guitars. That’s a big deal!
“What I find staggering about the whole thing is, how will it be policed? The customs person sees brown wood on a fingerboard – do they start chipping it off and analysing it? The enforcement will vary hugely across the world, the great irony being that the amount of rosewood used by the guitar industry is tiny compared with other uses such as furniture. But we have to be pragmatic and we absolutely support the preservation of endangered species. Diane Ponzio from Martin said something to me in 2016 that seems so relevant now. She said, ‘The biggest challenge for all guitar makers in the future is convincing customers to buy guitars that aren’t made of wood any more.’ That sounded a bit far fetched at the time. Now I’m not so sure!”