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Old 08-01-2010, 12:30 PM
Ted @ LA Guitar Sales Ted @ LA Guitar Sales is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: Southern California
Posts: 12,231
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The road trip guitar you got was probably one of the early versions where the whole back had to be unscrewed to work on it. Sadly the Internet chatter on those early guitars and Larry Amy's decision to sell them direct to the public at wholesale at first kept many dealers away from the later models which were fantatic guitars. I had no trouble selling them, the trick was to match the guitar to the client. Problem is not every dealer knows how to sell carbon guitars. I think Peavey needs to have a good long talk with the dealers that sold the most guitars than teach the rest of the dealers how to market them.

BTW, I always felt MacNichols the road trips hurt CA more than helped, and more than one person at CA agreed with me. Same goes for the dealer setups Mike was offering. In truth there is not a whole lot you can do to a CA and insinuating it needs a setup is never good for sales. In Mike's defense he has only been in the guitar business for two years. (Heck I have coffee stains on my desk that are older than that ) and you can't blame a guy for trying. This is where CA should have stepped in and made some suggestions.



It will be a tough road for the new CA. First they will have to overcome what has happened to their dealers in March. As their number one dealer I had over sixty guitars in inventory when I got the call that they were closing. All of a sudden I was looking at $100,000 in inventory that was no longer being supported by the manufacturer. Some of us took huge losses and will need to know exactly what Peavey has in mind before we write any more checks.

Then there's the economy. Many of us have had to cut back so lower priced guitars are selling better than higher priced models. This is where the CA RAW, and Rainsong Studio models come in. But some of you would be surprised to hear that when CA came out with the RAW models most of their dealers refused to stock them because of the lower margins. Same thing is happening with the Rainsong Studio line. There are truly amazing guitars but take a visit to any Rainsong dealers websites and see if they mention it. So the new CA will have it's work cut out for them.

Stay tuned
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