In the early aughts, I was the Technical Director and designer at Hamer guitars. The brand had long since been acquired by Kaman Music, which was eventually bought by Fender (FMIC). The company was floundering after a series of bad marketing decisions dictated by the parent company, and I was fighting to pursue a direction that more closely represented the mission (if you could call it that) of the original Hamer company that I founded with Paul Hamer, Jim Walker, and John Montgomery. As part of my vision I wanted to create a blog about our guitars that reminded musicians that Hamer had created the modern vintage boutique electric category. I wanted to showcase our team of craftsmen, and our artistry.
Unfortunately, I was up against a corporate structure that revolved around finding new “hot” products, selling the shit of them, then sending them on a steady slide into irrelevance via increasing discounts for volume buyers—then moving on to the next “big thing.” Kaman was a behemoth distribution company with 80 salespeople, working on commission. Despite the best of intentions the idea of maintaining a legacy brand wasn’t part of the equation.
Admittedly I could have done better. Not with the guitars, but with my interaction with the salespeople. Still, I did the best I could to infuse a little bit of Hamer’s “excellence is expected” philosophy into the mix. We were ships passing in the night. That said, props to company president and all-around great guy, Bill Kaman, who tried valiantly to keep Hamer on life support. Bill was always a believer, but in retrospect I now know that after the board of directors, salespeople really run the show. There were a lot of things that could have been done differently, and almost all of them are things that our loyal fans know nothing about. It wasn’t pricing. It wasn’t pickups, scale length, body shape, endorsements, or my resolute desire to build what I envisioned. It was just an uphill climb with the industry and the turmoil that publicly traded corporations naturally create within their population. The sales department’s desire to create budget instruments without a clear delineation was certainly the kiss of death.
Now, to get to the fucking point, I am attempting to archive our blog.
Here’s one example of what I faced daily. I suggested that we start a blog about our process and our people. I was aware of how important that was at the time, but when I raised the idea to the marketing people, they didn’t know what I was talking about. A few days later the vice president of sales and marketing (two jobs that never should be controlled by a single person) told me that he thought a blog was a bad idea. He had asked his teenage daughter (you can’t make this shit up) about “bh-lawgs” and she had warned that there was a lot of negative repercussions and commenting on them. So, before blogs were even in the mainstream, a teenager had shot me down. So, I did what any good corporate soldier would do—I just started one anyway.
By the time corporate realized that I’d gone rogue, we had thousands of readers. Salespeople were telling me that they loved it and that their accounts did too. We were getting a ton of custom orders but it was too little too late.
Anyway. I’m going to try to get together the remnants of my blog, which revolved around my take on guitars, and of course the people at Hamer who made the company so great. I don’t know if I have all of my material, but I’ll do the best I can to present a peek back in time, as well as what I’m doing now. Wish me luck—wish us luck.
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