San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Sonoma County
How did the world’s largest ukulele maker land in the Bay Area?
Tucked incongruously between the DMV and a kidney dialysis clinic in an unassuming office building in Petaluma is Kala Brand Music, the world’s largest ukulele manufacturer. The company sold more than a half million ukes last year alone.
The 37,000squarefoot facility includes a showroom, warehouse, offices and a manufacturing line. Employees, many of them local musicians, pluck their instruments in office cubicles, in conference rooms and on the shop floors as they work to send the sound around the world.
How did the characteristic instrument of Hawaii come to be produced in an anonymous office park in Petaluma?
“There’s a cool factor here in Sonoma County. Artists, musicians and creative types tend to gravitate to the area,” says Kala founder and CEO Mark Upton. “Petaluma is close enough to what’s going on in the big city, but still has the remote feel of a country town. “Plus,” he adds, laughing, “it’s where my wife is from!” Upton’s journey to becoming a ukulele mogul began, appropriately, in Hawaii in the early 1990s, where he worked as a painter, a musician and a recording engineer. “I played ukulele as a kid, and obviously it was everywhere in Hawaii and I loved the sound,” he said. “But at the time the market was pretty much just junky toys and really expensive instruments. I saw a need there.”
After meeting his wife in Hawaii and returning with her to Peta
luma, Upton began working for the Hohner music company, later developing a midrange ukulele for them. When Hohner’s offices moved to Southern California in 2004, Upton couldn’t bring himself to leave Petaluma, so he stayed and started his own ukulele company, calling it Kala after the Hawaiian word for forgiveness and release.
The market for ukuleles boomed just as Kala expanded its product line, enabling the firm to grow from a tiny office to what is now a $25 million company with 55 employees and thousands of global distributors. To cope with California’s high costs, most production has been outsourced to Asia, but hundreds of highend instruments are still made each year by craftspeople in Kala’s Petaluma workshop. The local models “are selling as fast as we can make them,” says production manager Sam Smiley. “Spread the word we’re hiring!”
Joy Cafiero, Kala’s head of marketing, says Kala makes ukuleles for everyone, and she’s not kidding. “The socalled expert marketing consultants laughed, but our market really is for
people aged 3 to 103.” Kala’s more than 200 ukulele models range from inexpensive plastic instruments for kids to works of functional fine art that sell for well over $1,000. “People have started collecting multiple ukuleles, which is good for us,” says Upton.
Kala has donated more than 25,000 ukuleles to schools in Sonoma County and around the country, providing learntoplay programs. “It’s a great first instrument, because it’s small and fairly easy to make a recognizable musical note,” says Smiley. “Plus they don’t get gross like school recorders with all that spit,” Cafiero adds.
Kala is innovating the ukulele market by mixing the traditional with new products like ukebanjos, ukeguitars and crazy fruitshaped models, with every variety of paint and style imaginable. Their recently introduced electric UBass ukuleles are played by nonHawaiian musicians like Vampire Weekend, Panic! at the Disco and Kendrick Lamar.
The company recently launched weekly Friday tours at its facility in Petaluma. Visitors can play some of the many models displayed in the inhouse showroom and feel that aloha spirit of Hawaii — even in Sonoma County.