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B’s Music celebrates 20th year with film
B’s Music is half as old as the man who owns it.
“I’ve been doing this for exactly half my life,” said Brian Hansen, of Mt. Pleasant. “That’s a weird thing.”
The store turns 20 next week, and to celebrate — in addition to in-store sales — Hansen commissioned one of my employees to interview former employees for a documentary to tell the B’s story.
“It’s really a celebration of the store,” said Jake O’brien, a Mt. Pleasant native who’s worked for B’s for approximately two years.
O’brien is wrapping up the 30 interviews he’s done and prepping to travel to California next week as part of Hansen’s team for a music instrument merchant’s convention in Anaheim. The convention is one of the two final pieces of the documentary’s puzzle. The other is an interview with Hansen.
Hansen said he’s been hands-off during filming and won’t watch the film until its premiere sometime this summer.
“I’ve just been paying for it and buying gear,” Hansen said.
They are waiting for O’brien to enter into the final editing stages before renting out the Broadway Theater for a onenight performance. When they do, Hansen said he plans to introduce it and sit in the front row and drink it in.
“I think I have to rip off the band-aid and watch it with everyone,” he said.
Hansen started working at what was Cook’s Music in 1998. He opened his own music store in Alma a few years later and acquired Cook’s Mt. Pleasant location a few years after that and opened B’s Music, 613 N. Mission St.
Last year, he acquired another former Cook’s location, the building next door at 615 N. Mission St. It was a tobacco store that closed. It’s now home to the core operations for B’s evolved business model, its studio where Web content is filmed and the shipping-and-receiving department for the business’s thriving online retail operation.
In 20 years, B’s has grown from Hansen employing himself to 20 employees. Last year, it did $1.2 million in sales, about half online, he said.
B’s grew quite a bit during the pandemic, and it was while everyone was avoiding crowds that they really installed the guts for the store’s online presence. While some retailers augment in-person sales with a Web presence, Hansen said he wanted to do it right but tying in sales to inventory. It took them approximately six months.
Hansen said they also took a hard look at how they handled
In 20 years, B’s has grown from Brian Hansen employing himself to 20 employees. Last year, it did $1.2 million in sales, about half online.
inventory to ensure they always had musical instruments and support equipment to sell. That includes pedals and B’s-branded merch.
Branding has taken its own importance. Hansen said he wants to establish the business as a regional destination for musicians to buy equipment.
That means making the store known on the Web.
They feature some hardto-get equipment while maintaining an inventory of basic stock knowing it could take up to a year to get orders fulfilled.
The stock is stored at the 615 Mission location — known around what Hansen jokingly refers to as the B’s Campus — with the basement full of boxes designed specifically to ship guitars.
615 is also a former Cook’s Music location, and before that was Bobo’s Bar. Beyond that, it has special significance to Hansen. Back in the 70s, his dad constructed the limegreen oval out front.
“I own my dad’s oval,” he said.
The Web content is filmed in the front, with shipping-and-receiving in the back.
There’s no sign, but occasionally people do mistake it for the music store and he’s had people bust in asking about guitar restringing while they’re in the middle of filming.
One bonus to owning both buildings is owning the entire parking lot in between, which he plans to have resurfaced.
He said he might even put arrows on the ground in front of 651 to direct people to in-person sales and service.
B’s has yet to monetize its Youtube channel, but that would provide another welcome stream of revenue.
Success comes not from revenue, however. It comes from organization, Hansen said.
“You have to be tight and good at it,” he said. Organization and discipline are key, and staff meetings involve “spreadsheets, numbers and math.”
it’s also a set-up for another 20 years in business, at the end of which there are two different endings.
Either the process of owning B’s is so easy the store practically runs itself, Hansen joked, or, “20 years from now there’ll be a going out of business sale.”