Dan Vedda

Music Store, Business

Product Prowess

How do you introduce new products to your clientele? Do you stock new items regularly and prominently pitch them to your customers, or do you hedge your bets an...

Shopper Insights

We’ve talked about customer service recently, and how the concept of “good customer service” varies with the expectations and tastes of individual customers. Re...
MI Instruments, Amazon MI Sales Increase

The ABCs of Affiliation

A couple of articles back, I mentioned in passing that we signed on with another company as an affiliate for band instrument rentals. That small sentence trigge...
Buying And Selling

Shopping in a Nice Environment

As I’ve mentioned before, my store aims for what I consider to be a “curated inventory”: the products we carry, from strings to books to instruments, must eithe...

Key Traits of a Great Employee

As I write this installment, it’s Thanksgiving week, and I’m feeling particularly thankful under my retail hat. You see, I have a new staff member. I’ve known h...

Today’s MI Experience

In our last episode, we talked about listening to consumer needs, as we rethink business models and move forward to the next iteration of the music products ind...

Blending the Old with the New

We’ve been talking about disruption in the last few “Veddatorials.” I mentioned last month that, while retail has seen channel disruption (big-box stores, inter...

Appetite for Disruption

Disruption. We hear about it in every industry, and if you’re not a consumer, it can be scary. Unless, of course, your business is part of the disruption. Then ...

Word of Mouth Is Still Important

You can read a thousand articles — from content-lite bullet points to detailed, long reads — about advertising in this always-on, socially intense, tech-enabled...

Starbucks Dreams

They opened a Starbucks on my route to work. Or, rather, they put up a new building and relocated an existing one. It’s on a busy corner at a major intersection...