Blazer & Henkes 000 45 12 frettes à vendre

C'est tout à fait ça. Ils ont rarement une guitare à l'atelier. Donc, si un client n'honorait pas sa commande, ça leur permettrait d'avoir un instrument à vendre aux gens qui passent, ce qui est très rare. De nombreuses personnes aimeraient acheter une BH sans avoir à attendre.

Benja

Willi réagit sur le forum Collings à propos du prix de la 000 45 deluxe. Voici sa réponse:

"In the beginning of this thread there were some comments on the price of this guitar with the question, how it might have been calculated, if it is fair, how the proceeds will be split and what will be "lost" in currency and charges.

Since these things are nothing secret I want to put some light on this with the intention that you get an idea about cost calculation and real costs of products manufactured in a small workshop like ours.

First: why this guitar is offered for sale at The Music Emporium? We are doing a mix of retail business and building for shops about 50/50 %. Most of you know we are building only for two shops in the US, this is The Music Emporium and Mass Street Music. We appreciate our connection since Stu Cohen of TME and Jim Baggett of MSM both are good friends, otherwise this all wouldn't work. The reason why we did not want to offer this particular guitar in our shop is that on one side we find it in the best hands at TME with this wonderful people and in their fine store among many other high end guitars. We feel this is an honor for us to find our guitars represented by them. On the other side we hardly find the time to sell this guitar in our shop in taking pics, putting them on the site, doing the customer advice and so on. We appreciate to see our guitar now offered at this place.

The guitar was not preordered by TME and since it is costly we wanted to commission it. This way we can help to keep the costs low and since we are sure it will sell to the right person we do not need to have this guitar prepaid.

The commission is about 20% less costs meaning the sales price listed of course was discussed before among Stu and us. But it reflects the current market value of such a model in my opinion and will cover the costs in a fair way. The costs that have to be covered by the shop: running the complete sale beginning with the importing procedure, listing and featuring it on their site and the final sale procedure. I presume you all are familiar what costs come up for a store. Further on there are 8.7% US customs duties charged on the declared value and the shipping/insurance costs.

Our dealer price is roughly Euro 18.000 what is $22,600 with the today’s exchange rate of 1:1.31 Euro to US$. This exchange rate is affected by several reasons but if compared the value of each currency directly I would say we get as much out of Euro 1 as people in the US of $1 meaning leveling out the currency differences would mean we couldn't afford to ship the guitar to the US. But finally we feel the price and current retail market value of $30K for this model is correct and equal to the same or similar model of other makers.

The Euro 18K left have to be split follows - I made a detailed cost calculation on a similar guitar a while ago that could be used for this guitar, too although the relation between labor costs/working hours and costs for the material might have changed towards higher material costs and less work hours. While costs for labor might have been doubled the RW is about 10 times more expensive. On the other hand we might have speeded up some operations and complete such a guitar faster now.

Material: Euro 3K with the biggest part for the wood, pearl, special parts like the tuners and so on.
The general costs of running our workshop meaning room, tools, organization, bookkeeping, maintenance, then costs of labor in preparing and developing things like templates, plans and such sum up of about 40% of our time. This means Euro 6K off to cover running costs. Of the 15K remaining will be 9K left after the costs have been paid.

9K left for labor/working hours that sum up 238h for this model according my calculation. This makes about Euro 38 wages per hour before dues, taxes, coming out about Euro 23. Guitar making actually is a less profitable business and I don't know any maker who gathered a fortune this way. In the past we were also doing repairs and dealing with vintage guitars but we don't find much time yet besides the building. I should mention that there's only Rudie and me working in the shop, nobody else.

You may ask what the hell these guys are doing when building one single guitar only in more than 200 hours. This is how we work, how we build guitars and how they are constructed. Most of this depends on the handwork (in opposite to factory designed guitars), on the old style of construction and especially in this case on the pearl inlays done in the old way. If there's some request to learn what I mean with "old way" I can figure out some more in detail. This might be especially of interest concerning the pearl borders since I guess besides our customers this style of workmanship is not widely known or practiced by many makers. Also I suppose there's some request what kind of recreation this model actually is and what it means today. There's a lot to say on this side, too."

Benja