Why Don’t Major Guitar Manufacturers Use K&K Pickups?
April 15, 2009 – 5:04 pmA lot of customers ask us why the major guitar manufacturers (Martin, Gibson, etc.) don’t sell models with pre-installed K&K pickups. It’s not that we don’t get the offers, but we usually have to turn them down for one big reason: price.
The big guitar makers are used to getting rock bottom pricing on the electronics they put into their instruments. When we deal with them, they usually ask for something in the range of 80 percent off the retail price. The bigger pickup manufacturers may meet those prices, but we can’t. Why? It’s about who makes the pickups, how they’re made, and how much to charge for the whole process.
All our products are 100% made in the USA, with American labor
While other pickup manufacturers outsource their labor or part of it to cheap countries, like Mexico or Asia, all our products are assembled and made in Oregon. We pay a fair wage to our employees and we give good benefits. Our techs and assemblers are highly skilled and specifically trained and some of our employees are musicians too, so they appreciate being able to make a living doing something they love.
Our products are assembled by human beings, not by machines
Having pickups built by machines can save money – but the quality usually suffers when a pickup is designed to be mass produced robotically. We design our pickups so that they sound great, not so that a machine can easily put them together and kick out 1000 per hour.
We don’t hike our retail prices to give bigger discounts
The easiest way to allow for 80 percent discounts and still be able to stay in business is to raise the retail price. At K&K, we refuse to pump up our prices like that because we don’t want to hurt individual customers.
The guitar manufacturers that we do work with are usually smaller companies with high-end instruments. These luthiers share our passion for great sound, and they don’t compromise on their product.
We would like thank our customers for using K&K products and support American jobs!
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