Guitars & Stars in Los Angeles, CA : Part 1

It's all rock 'n' roll! Here's the story behind our recent trip to the NAMM Show by the National Association of Music Merchandisers, held in Los Angeles, CA.

My husband, Greg, has been a computer geek since 1984 when his parents bought an IBM PCjr home computer. Little did they know that purchase would change the trajectory of Greg's life, as he took to it as the proverbial duck in water. He remembers at thirteen having to get special permission from the SysOp of the Bulletin Board to have access long enough to download a 60 k game - waiting patiently while each block of data downloaded with a kachunk through the noisy modem for hours on end.

Here's Greg today, working at his computer in the EuroLuxHome.com office, with the "help" of the cats!  Greg's computer habit led to an interest in programming and his belief that any repetitive task can, and should, be automated with technology. From programming his computer to write the 500 sentences of "I will behave appropriately in Mrs. Fowler's algebra class," that were assigned due to poor behavior choices, to creating a whizbang spreadsheet that could calculate packaging and distribution costs of drugs throughout Europe as an internship project for Eli Lilly in Germany during graduate school at the University of South Carolina's International Business School, Greg has always been adept with computers.

However, during his first job out of graduate school as a cost accountant at Fabrique Nationale, he took a two-week intensive Microsoft Access database course, and had his first “Aha!”  moment in business - complete with angels singing and trumpeting fanfare. Databases are just his thing - he loves how he can see how to organize all of the data to make it do exactly what he wants it to do - sometimes speaking of it in reverent tones as a thing of beauty for those who can see it.

Fast forward nearly twenty years, and EuroLuxHome.com runs on Greg's custom, in-house-designed software that manages the data and images of more than a million products, and controls the flow of that information among nearly 20 marketplaces. It has been our special sauce and how we compete as a mom-and-pop antiques, furniture, lighting and home decor business in the vast sea of eCommerce.
Greg has also been a musician for nearly as long as he has been a computer geek - starting with his first electric guitar in 1985. He bought it for $50 in rolls of quarters that he had saved up from washing cars, as part of a deal with his parents that they would pay for lessons for a year if he bought his own instrument - and yet another passion was born. Eventually Greg even taught guitar lessons at Sims Music in Columbia, SC, during college for party money.

Nearly two years ago, we stopped at Sims Music and I bought Greg a very beautiful Ibanez bass guitar as a gift - just because he works so hard and he really loved it.  Justin Sims said to Greg, "Hey, you know about selling online, right? Can you help me figure out how to sell more music equipment online?"

On that day, two passions collided - guitars and computers - and Sync2Sell.com was born. At first Greg just wanted to see if he could take our method of eCommerce and make it work for someone else in a different industry - more as a personal challenge and a mental puzzle. Justin was already selling on Reverb.com, but was manually listing musical equipment one item at a time. When Greg connected Justin's point-of-sale system, Lightspeed, to Reverb with his software solution, Justin's sales immediately jumped 800% and kept rising month after month. It was such a significant and sustained increase that within a few months, both Lightspeed and Reverb took notice and began asking questions. And that is how a business is born - when market demand meets opportunity, experience, and hustle.

Sync2Sell.com officially launched in September 2018 and continues to help Sims Music and many other music stores increase their online sales exponentially. And to make a long story long, that is how we ended up at winter NAMM - the National Association of Music Merchandisers - held in Los Angeles, CA.

In my next post Guitars and Stars Part 2 I'll tell you what - and who - we saw on our trip!