Guitar shop survives due to refusing to ‘sell anything that won’t help …
Twang Guitars and Music Academy on Penge High Street will be celebrating its 20th anniversary next year. As well as selling and repairing instruments and accessories, it is also home to the Twang Academy, a music tuition business that delivers around 100 hours of tuition to around 170 learners each week. This summer will also see the launch of the Twang Music Foundation, a charity which aims to give disadvantaged children in local schools the opportunity to play music[1].
This is not something that 58-year-old owner Philip Tindley could have anticipated when he started working there as a guitar teacher back in 2004, when the shop was primarily a bookshop that also sold a small number of guitars. Mr Tindley, originally from Finchley in North London, explained that he first discovered the shop when house-hunting in Penge[2]. “It was on that fateful day when we went to see a house in Albert Road that I came up here and saw a bookshop with guitars in the window. I came in and had a chat with them and the rest is history.”
Like a lot of music shops, Twang Guitars has faced fierce competition from online sellers
Over time the guitar sales and music teaching side of the business grew, and by 2010 it had taken over the entire shop. He said: “I always had a dream that I wanted to develop the guitar shop side and I always knew the bookshop side was in decline.” In 2010 Mr Tindley also founded the Twang Academy as a separate business, and gradually converted the rear of the shop into four dedicated studios kitted out with all the equipment the Academy’s 16 tutors need to teach people how to play, record and produce music.
The courses are extremely popular and attract a wide range of learners. He added: “Customers are anybody and everybody. We literally have people who are two years old, and we had one woman who was 85 years old having piano lessons.”
The Academy is now so busy on the weekends Mr Tindley is looking at converting the upstairs flat into more teaching space. As Francesca Curle, 21, store manager and tutor, explained: “At the moment the only thing holding us back is space. We’re getting new sign-ups all the time, and are struggling for rooms at our key times”.
Community is a key part of Mr Tindley’s approach to business, and he described the shop as “a bit of a community hub” where regulars often drop by for a chat. He added: “We have a nice environment here and people always say that we’re very happy. And we are, and we want to keep everybody happy as well.”
This is reflected in the kind of service Twang Guitars offers. “I don’t sell anything to anybody that I think is not going to help them out,” he said. “Very often when we get guitars that come in just for a re-string I will look at them and say ‘do you know what, this could be improved’ and if I can do a quick improvement on it to make it easier for them I’ll just do it.” Mr Tindley is also looking at ways of broadening Twang’s impact on the community, and the Twang Music Foundation, which will support tutors going into local schools to provide music lessons that wouldn’t otherwise be available, is a key part of this. Mr Tindley added: “We’re going to raise money with events, and we’re also looking for donations of musical instruments.
If they’re in poor shape we can fix them up and use them. In fact, we’ve had quite a few donations already.” Like a lot of music shops, Twang Guitars has faced fierce competition from online sellers, but the teaching and instrument repair sides of the business have compensated for lower instrument sales, with teaching alone now making up 50 per cent of the business.
As Mr Tindley explained: “Where once upon a time the guitar shop was the cake and the teaching was the icing, its really shifted now. [The guitar shop] is now the icing on the cake.”
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