Roland has announced that it is enhancing its “Roland Store’ experience at select retailers in the U.S. and globally.
The Roland store-in-stores offer full-time Roland product experts, hands-on demonstrations, and access to the full Roland and BOSS catalog of products. They also showcase how Roland and BOSS products can help consumers learn about, create, and perform music.
Roland has developed a new technology for the stores, “Audience Specific Experience ASX,” that controls the lighting, video and audio in the spaces and can be altered by the press of a button to match your preferences.
“With Roland’s Audience Specific Experience ASX, each person who walks into the Roland Stores can enjoy music, lighting, and screen content matched to their own needs,” said Corin Birchall, Roland Global Retail Operations Manager. “We’re excited to be able to expand this upgraded retail experience to more retailers globally so that both consumers and the sales teams that rely on them can enjoy it.”
Roland opened their first retail store-in-store in 2001 in the UK, later expanding across Europe and Japan, with the aim of giving customers the very best physical experience, product knowledge, and post-sales support.
Currently, Roland Stores have opened in multiple cities in the United States, Glasgow, Montreal, Beijing, Sydney, and São Paulo. Roland has plans to expand to other metropolitan areas in the future.
I’ve been saying for years that companies need to create their own show rooms, instead of relying on retailers to sell you whatever crap they have the highest margin on. But… Too bad it’s Roland doing this. I wish that companies with more interesting products would pick this up.
I’m with Xtopher here and I’ll up it another notch: I’d like to see it done in related groupings, as with the purchase of Sequential by Focusrite. Fold in Novation, sell gear at a few % off the top and I’m there. There’s a bottom line to brick-&-mortar, so it could only work in bigger cities, but I’d be seriously drawn to an all-British or all-Japanese store. It also seems likely that only Roland or Yamaha could manage it well, due to their gargantuan catalogs. Not a good place for date night, unless you’re both gear hounds.
This seems like a stepping stone for somebody like Roland to creating their own stores in malls, ala the Apple Store or Microsoft Store.
Not many companies could do this, but Roland has a complete line of synth gear, guitar effects, cabling etc. They could also have the brand awareness that they could sell lifestyle products, like the 808/909 clothing that they’ve released in recent years or albums that feature Roland gear prominently.
Not sure if this would be viable, but if there was a store like this in a big city close to me, I’d definitely make the trip, especially if they had a ‘genius bar’ with people that actually new the gear inside and out.
virtually no one purchases gear at stores anymore. ask hans thomann. his store in treppendorf, germany, is always empty of customers.
Not sure if you’re being sarcastic or not, since Thomann is the #1 music gear retailer.
But at least here in the states, most music gear stores don’t really offer an advantage over buying online. You’d think that you’d be able to go into Guitar Center (which, in spite of the name, sells all types of music gear) and try out the latest synths from at least Korg, Roland & Yamaha.
But at our store, they’ve got just a couple of new synths, a couple of used ones, and then half a dozen inexpensive home electric keyboards. The store here used to be much better. I’d love to visit a store like Perfect Circuit or Noisebug or Schneidersladen, but stores like that are limited to a handful of the biggest cities in the world.
So something like this Roland store would be awesome to have in town. But my impression is that electronic music gear is getting so competitive that there’s no margin for nice stores with customer service anymore.
Guitar Center is horrible it’s owned by Mitt Romney and Bain Capital who buys up retailers as well as the malls they operate in, raise rent and force the retailers to liquidate.
The handful of American Roland stores on that site were in Guitar Centers. I’ve been to that Nashville store and it is marginally more well stocked than most other Guitar Centers, but still not even close to the friendly, inviting environment that retailers should be offering to get people off the internet and in their stores.
It seems like a missed opportunity.
If you go to the NAMM Show, electronic music gear and recording gear are as big as guitars now. It feels like retailers are either behind the times and don’t understand how popular electronic music gear is, or they’re just giving up trying to compete with Sweetwater.
I’ve been to Sweetwater’s store and it is f***ing epic. Fort Wayne, IN – not so much!
When I see what the synth-focused stores in the US are doing, it makes me jealous for people that live in the top-10 big cities.
@Torgood: 1) Do you think SW would actually buy GC, if nothing else but to have it’s inventory and destroy its primary competition? 2) Would SW then dominate + raise prices everywhere or stay in check (hopefully not repeat of AT&T in 1990s) 3) Wouldn’t brand names go out of business paying rent for a store like that? 4) Could an Amazon of musical instruments be made or is that already SW + why don’t SW + GC + other stores team up like small stores have – maybe making prices go down?