PULLING STRINGS
Delta company hits the right note with the world’s guitar makers.
When Dave Dunwoodie’s mom showed him a newspaper ad for a vacuum cleaner salesman and suggested the 19- year- old aspiring musician get a job, neither of them could have predicted the outcome.
“I was really ( awful) for the first couple of weeks, then I got it. It was just like being on stage and it was a lot of fun,” Dunwoodie said. “In the first month, I was the No. 1 guy.”
One month was as long as young Dunwoodie lasted at Filter Queen.
But the daily sales training he received helped him build a Delta company that supplies every major guitar manufacturer in the world. Gibson, Taylor, Yamaha, Godin, Martin, Washburn … the list goes on and on.
Dunwoodie’s Graph Tech makes and sells guitar parts known as nuts and saddles — innocuous looking little plastic- y strips on either end of a guitar that the strings rest on.
“We’re the biggest nut and saddle manufacturer in the world now,” said Dunwoodie, who has just picked up Fender and Epiphone as customers. Eighty per cent of his products are made by 22 employees in Delta. Ninety per cent is exported. After Dunwoodie quit Filter Queen — “I didn’t like the hours” — he was hired as a seasonal sales clerk in his favourite music store where “none of the other guys, including the owner, knew how to sell. I’m fresh from doing vacuum cleaner features and benefits. I cleaned up in December. They asked me to stay.” The second key to Dunwoodie’s success is his non- stop kitchen- table innovation. In the music store, staff used to rub pencils in the grooves of guitar nuts to prevent strings from sticking. Dunwoodie looked for another solution. He went to his local library, read up on polymers, borrowed $ 5,000 from his mom, hired a mould maker and bought a $ 1,200 ad in a guitar magazine. The first year, he sold $ 18,000 in “slippery” nuts.
Before long, he was back in the library dreaming up a material he called “TUSQ” or “manmade ivory.” TUSQ nuts and saddles transfer string vibration and increase harmonic tone better than traditional materials such as bone.
With TUSQ at his side, Dunwoodie faithfully showed up — and was largely ignored — at industry trade shows for the next nine years.
He and his wife, Cheryl, paid the bills playing nights with their popular local Motown band. “Christmas time, we’d get 10 one- nighters all in a row all paying $ 1,500 a night. My wife and I would get twothirds of that.”
Then, in 1992, everything changed.
New computerized manufacturing meant guitars could be made to precise specifications. Taylor and Larrivée decided Dunwoodie’s injection- moulded nuts and saddles were just what they needed.
“I could do exact size. All the other stuff back then was cow bone and before that, ivory. That stuff had to be cut up, shaped, sanded, slotted. That’s a lot of labour,” Dunwoodie said. “Now they could buy an injection- moulded part made specifically for them.”
That magical year, one large manufacturer after another signed up. Persistence and product finessing finally paid off.
“I could have quit after nine years and the company would have been a failure.”
Graph Tech’s annual sales now total $ 3.3 million. Sixty per cent is to guitar manufacturers for factory installation. Forty per cent is direct to U. S. retailers, to distributors in 42 countries selling to music stores, and online.
While many companies sell nuts and saddles, Graph Tech is the only established brand. “Our competition is tradition,” Dunwoodie said, referring to products made of bone, Corian and generic materials.
These days, his biggest challenge is keeping in touch with his many customers — 50 or 60 guitar manufacturers, some 50 distributors worldwide and 800 music stores. He is beginning to question whether retail is still worth it. “Where do we focus?”
One of his latest creations is a hand cream, of all things.
He once tagged along to a Chinese cosmetics factory with a friend. “There’s about 800 square feet of walls all lined up with hand creams, face creams, body wash. I’m squirting stuff on my hand and I’m wondering what we can do for a guitar player.”
A few months later, he came up with Chops PrePlay, a hand cream for musicians that “neutralizes the problem of sticky hands before playing” while prolonging guitar string life. So far, sales are “hit and miss,” he said amiably. “If we make it, we’ll be the leader in the industry. If it never goes over, well, we gave it a try.” He loves product creation. “When I’m working on an idea, I feel like I’m a moth and there’s a light bulb and the moth is trying to get inside.”
Dunwoodie said the key to Graph Tech’s success is product positioning. He can compete with Asian nut and saddle manufacturers as long as he builds strong brands and automates production to minimize labour costs.
He has also tapped into new opportunities such as the exploding ukulele market and supplies both Kala and Mahalo, which between them make 900,000 ukuleles a year.
But after 30 years in business, the Delta entrepreneur still values his old- school sales training.
“I took Dale Carnegie, too. Somebody taught me ‘ Feel, Felt, Found.’ That’s how you handle an objection. The guy says ‘ I only use bone nuts.’ ‘ Oh, I know how you feel, Fred. I felt the same way and a lot of other customers felt the same way. What they found out was TUSQ actually produces more harmonics than bone. … You agree with them the whole way. That was one of the great lessons I learned. It’s always stuck with me.”