Exclusive Q&A: Sweetwater Sound creates personalized online guitar-shopping experience
Sweetwater Sound is in tune with the digital needs of musicians buying instruments online.
Chain Store Age recently spoke with Sweetwater Sound, a Fort Wayne, Indiana-based online retailer of music gear and instruments, about how it leverages in-house-developed technology to provide a personalized experience for guitar customers. A Sweetwater spokesperson explained how the retailer delivers a digital customer experience as close to that found in a brick-and-mortar music store as possible.
What made Sweetwater decide to focus on selling guitars online?
“Since Sweetwater’s inception, professional audio and recording equipment has always been number one. That was our sole purpose until about 2005, when we introduced guitars to our offerings. We determined that the music industry – along with musicians – are driven by the way equipment and instruments feel and sound, but also by the way they look.
“So, while guitar players seek to personally experience a guitar, hold it and see it, they also buy with their eyes and if they’re attracted to an instrument’s look, then there’s a chance they’ll buy it. At that time, most of the executive board prided themselves on playing guitar as a hobby, so it was a natural progression for us to add guitars to our list of offerings. After years of personalizing the experience for our customers, Sweetwater now offers over 50 different guitar brands online and the guitar sales make up the second most profitable segment within the company.”
How is consumer purchase behavior tracked?
“With a hybrid of technologies. Sweetwater really prides itself on its customer service, which has won numerous awards over the years. Our sales engineers spend countless hours ensuring our customers are taken care of and that their questions are being answered. This has translated to rich, personal relationships with customers that allow us to make note of their interests, disinterests and hobbies. From there, we marry in a layer of tech, which ensures that the team is efficient and always thinking ahead.”
Can you provide details your image collaboration with Canon?
“We use a lot of Canon products in our Guitar Gallery photography and have worked with them to develop coding that allowed the photographs we took on our Canon cameras to be processed and uploaded to the Sweetwater website in under five minutes. That photo processing system takes the raw photos from each guitar shoot and makes them ready to deploy on the web.
“Specifically, it takes about two minutes to photograph each guitar and, on average, takes about five minutes for it to be online after photography is done. We also developed software in-house that not only recognizes the color of a guitar to facilitate customer filtering by colors, but ours also trains itself to get better by tracking variations in color or lighting from the photos to a specific item ID. It's patentable, but we've never bothered.”
How is shipping handled?
“Guitars are sent through a 55-point inspection by Sweetwater’s Guitar Gallery personal specialists before being shipped to customers. This is all done by hand through Guitar Gallery employees, and it’s something our customers have strongly verbalized their support and appreciation for.
“Every guitar is shipped out of our distribution center, which is housed at Sweetwater headquarters, and includes our signature candy treat bag as a way for us to say thank you. We cover ground shipping and have a special packing machine we use to help insure safe travel. Most guitars also ship inside of guitar cases, which can add an additional measure of safety.”
Are there any future plans you can discuss?
“We are building a new 477,000-sq.-ft. warehouse that will be done in the spring of 2020. In addition to inventory storage, shipping, and receiving, it will also house an expanded Guitar Gallery operation and accompanying photo studios.”