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http://www.sacbee.co...p-9029200c.html

Pianos online
Folsom man plays to wide market
By Clint Swett -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 a.m. PST Wednesday, January 14, 2004
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It's become routine to buy books, clothes and wine via the Internet. John Tennant wants to add pianos to people's cybershopping list.
A Folsom resident and former Intel employee, Tennant launched PianoQuest.com, an online store, in June 2000. Since then Tennant said he has sold more than 400 pianos to customers from Alaska to Mexico.

Working from his home office and a warehouse in Long Beach, Tennant imports new and used pianos from Japan and Germany, refurbishes some of the used models at a factory in Mexico and ships them to customers throughout North America.

While pianos might seem an odd choice for online inventory, Tennant said they have one advantage: Few big players are likely to enter the market.

"There's a natural barrier to entry in terms of selling something that heavy," he said. "I don't think Amazon or Circuit City will ever sell anything like this."

Online sales give him more geographical reach than traditional stores have, he said. As evidence he points out that many of his customers live in rural areas hours away from piano stores.

Other customers, he said, are just attracted by pricing that he says is an average of $2,000 less than what they would find in a typical retail piano showroom.

"A lot of the people who use us are bargain hunters because pianos are so expensive," he said.

Piano stores are expensive to maintain because they must support a showroom, sales staff, teaching rooms and an inventory of new instruments, Tennant said in explaining his price advantage.

"They have a lot of built-in overhead, so they have higher markups than we do," he said.

Price was one of the factors that persuaded Caralee Smith of Sacramento to buy a rosewood Kawai upright from PianoQuest.

"We went to a couple of local piano stores and checked the paper," she said. "For the price and the look we wanted, PianoQuest was the best. ... It's one of the smartest buys we've ever made."

Tennant is riding a modest rebound of interest in pianos. After topping $709.9 million in sales in 1998 at the height of the last economic boom, piano sales declined steadily through 2001 to $552.5 million. They recovered to $568.8 million in 2002, according to the International Music Products Association.

But even with a revival of interest in pianos, Tennant faces some obstacles other online retailers don't have to confront.

Perhaps the largest, he said, is people's reluctance to send someone they don't know thousands of dollars for a product they've never seen.

"People are really concerned that their money will disappear into a black hole," Tennant said.

To address that issue, he instituted an escrow system where a customer's money is held by an independent third party until the customer has inspected the piano and is satisfied with it.

That was a comfort to Jackson Walker, a Nashville, Tenn., attorney who found PianoQuest last year when doing an Internet search for used pianos.

"They made the process very easy, and the prices were 50 percent lower than in retail stores," said Walker, who paid $2,100 for a used 50-inch Kawai upright and another $400 for shipping.

Walker said he was surprised by how well the piano looked and sounded when it arrived at his house. "They told me it might be out of tune, but when the movers uncrated it and set it up, it was right in tune," Walker said. "And if you're standing five feet away it looks absolutely new. A lot of people thought I bought a new piano."

Much of PianoQuest's inventory is used Yamaha and Kawai pianos, which Tennant buys from dealers in Japan and ships to Long Beach in large crates that hold 15 of the instruments.

From there Tennant contracts with movers who ship the pianos to customers across the country, at charges ranging from about $200 to $600.

He also picks up some used Steinways from U.S. dealers and has them refurbished in a former Baldwin piano factory in Mexico.

Lately he's been importing new instruments from a German company that provides both German-and Chinese-made pianos under the Augsburg and Sorbonne brands.

Tennant is not the only one selling pianos on the Web, but appears to be one of only a few with no physical retail location.

For instance, Rick Jones Pianos near Washington, D.C., has an extensive Web site but also sells from its brick-and-mortar outlet. A Kawai upright similar to the $2,000 model purchased by Walker, the Nashville lawyer, is listed for $3,000 on the Rick Jones site.

But Jim Nelson, assistant manager at the Music Exchange, a Sacramento piano retailer, said music stores provide advantages that online sales can't.

"Anyone who knows pianos will want to play the instrument before he buys it," Nelson said. In addition, piano retailers provide buying advice as well as ongoing service, such as setup, tuning and warranty work, "things impossible to find online," he said.

"This is a competitive business," he said. "But I wouldn't say we feel threatened by online sales."



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About the Writer
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The Bee's Clint Swett can be reached at (916) 321-1976 or cswett@sacbee.com.


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PianoQuest.com
Business: Online piano sales
Headquarters: Folsom

Founded: 2000

Employees: Six

Number of pianos sold: More than 400

Web address: www.pianoquest.com

Source: PianoQuest