When a Lousy Web Site Makes Sense.

You'd think that a business that depends solely on the Internet for sales would have a pretty slick web site. In our case you'd be wrong!

Our company, MacKenzie & Marr Guitars makes and sells wonderful solid wood acoustic guitars. They win praise from pretty much everyone who plays them. That makes us very happy because we put a ton of work into insuring musicians fall in love with our instruments.

Our web site on the other had sucks the big one. It's lousy. We know it and we don't particularly care. That may strike some as surprising considering that it's almost the only place you can buy one of our guitars. But we have limited resources and clearly defined priorities. At this stage in our growth pouring money into web design doesn't meet our criteria for proper use of capital. Let me explain why.

My partner, Jonathan MacKenzie and I started MacKenzie & Marr Guitars on the premiss that we could sell high-end acoustic guitars over the Internet and save musicians hundreds of dollars in the process.

The musical instrument business is horribly inefficient. If you've bought a high-end guitar in a music store in the last few years you've probably subsidized the 19th century distribution system that got it there, paid a good chunk of change to the retailer's bank to cover the inventory carrying costs and maybe handed a buck or two to the suppliers credit department to chase down overdue invoices. It's a good bet that less than half the purchase price went to the cost of making your guitar.

We gambled (correctly as it turned out) that musicians would buy a guitar, sight unseen, over the Internet if:
1.The guitar was exceptional
2.The saving was substantial
3.Other musicians had strongly positive opinions about the guitar and our company.

We also gambled that we could launch MacKenzie & Marr Guitars on a shoe string. Because our factory could only turn out a limited number of guitars a month the potential revenue was hard coded. To be profitable we had to cut expenses to the bone. Part of that austerity was predicated by the business model of keeping prices low and, truth be told, part of it was because we're kind of cheap. We really don't like spending money.

Initially we decided a bare bones Web site – one that told a bit about our company and our guitar and contained a shopping cart to facilitate sales – would do for our launch. We knew it wouldn't be pretty but it would have to do until we generated enough cash flow to bring in the Web pros.

In January we appeared on Dragon's Den, word of mouth spread and sales took off. We're sitting on a five month backlog of orders and a healthy bank account. Time to upgrade the web site, right? Not around here it's not! Lousy seems to be working just fine and at MacKenzie & Marr Guitars what works doesn't get fixed.

We could spend a cool ten grand on a new site and have something that looks as slick as Taylor and Martin – or we could plow that 10 grand into wood, skills training and equipment to raise guitar production to meet demand. We think our friends and customers will be a lot happier when they don't have to wait four months for their guitars don't you?