In some corners of the music products industry, people bemoan the fact that many of the most iconic companies in the musical instrument space—you know the laundry list of them—no longer have anyone in executive management with the name that the products bear. Of course, there are notable exceptions: Hartley Peavey still helms Peavey Electronics. Bob Taylor continues to lead Taylor Guitars. Well, here’s another music industry lifer to add to the list: Greg Deering, Founder of Deering Banjo Company, who gave generously of his time to speak to The Retailer this month. Besides delving into his fascinating background and the path he took to eventually create his namesake company, Deering also expounds on his longtime mission to rescue banjos from their “orphan instrument” status and return them to their onetime position of unparalleled popularity.
Enjoy the conversation….
The Music & Sound Retailer: Let’s start with your background. Tell us how you initially developed a passion for music. How did you end up on a path that would eventually lead you to the musical instrument industry?
Greg Deering: Well, I was fortunate enough to have a father who was an avid craftsman. He was an aircraft engineer, and he loved to build model airplanes. He started teaching me how to build model airplanes when I was two years old. These are flying, scale models…these are not plastic airplanes. He turned me loose to build my first kit when I was five. And, when I was seven, he brought me my first set of drafting tools and started teaching me to be a draftsman. And then, when I was eight, we started designing model airplanes together. And so, it was very unusual, growing up and having that kind of exposure. He wasn’t forcing me into it. I dearly loved every minute of it. It was like candy to me.
I started playing the violin in the fourth grade, which is the normal age for musical instrument lessons in school. And I played the violin or the viola in the school orchestra all the way through high school. But, I became exposed in the late ’50s to the Kingston Trio. That was because of the song that they did called “Tijuana Jail.” That was a song about an actual event that occurred in Tijuana, Mexico. A casino was opened up there, and they sent invitations to all kinds of people in San Diego to come to the grand opening of this casino. My dad got an invitation, and I can recall overhearing my parents talking about whether or not they should go. The secretary at the wind tunnel where my dad worked had some friends from out of town, and they did go down to the casino.
The Federales busted the casino, and the two people ended up in the Tijuana jail. It took them a couple of days to get home. One of my dad’s friends at the wind tunnel wrote a poem about the event, and called it, “The Gambler’s Lament.” It got sent into a local radio station and, about a year later, the Kingston Trio came out with the same words, but they’d put them to music. The song was called “Tijuana Jail.” My dad’s friend, Ed White, never got credit for it. But, because of that, everybody at work went out and bought the 45. It became a hit single, and that was my first exposure to the Kingston Trio.
Years later, when I was in junior high school, my best friend was the French horn player in the orchestra. I was in his house one day, and he had a whole Kingston Trio album. I didn’t even know they existed! He put it on the record player. Then, he reached over, picked up a guitar and started playing along with the record. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I was looking at the album cover, listening to the record, looking at Chris playing the guitar…and I saw that they had a banjo. I said to Chris, “I’ve got to get a banjo.” And I’ve never looked back. I’ve been in constant pursuit of the banjo ever since. That was in 1963, when I was 13 years old.
The Retailer: Fast forwarding from 1963, tell me about how the Deering Banjo Company came to be founded. What path did you take to creating your own company, and how has Deering Banjo Company grown from its humble beginnings?
Deering: Well, I started playing the banjo, and I eventually learned the guitar. I played music in high school. I was part of a folk rock band. I did a lot of church work and a lot of work around town, playing folk music and folk rock music in college. When I went to college, I really needed a better banjo and I couldn’t afford it. So, I took a wood shop class to build a banjo. In that wood shop class, there were two guys who were interested in making instruments. And they were going to be opening up a shop near the college in a little town called Lemon Grove CA.
They were going to open the shop in May 1970. And I just showed up and started helping them build workbenches. Before long, I heard them talking about how they just wanted to build guitars, and they were worried about having to do repair work. I was looking for a way to get to be a part of all that, so I said, “I’ll do the repair work.” They said OK, and they let me have a workbench. So, I got to do repair work and build banjos. And the name of that shop was “The American Dream.”
The way it worked was, if customers came in and they were looking for repairs or banjos, I would just deal with them as if it were my own business. At the end of every month, I’d show them all my receipts and I’d pay the shop owners 20 percent of what I took in. So, it was kind of a co-op. We were all just young kids. I was not quite 20 when that opened.
A couple of years later, I met a young man who was still going to Madison High School, who was interested in building. He came out and bought some binding and some fret wire from me, and he went to his high school wood shop and built his first guitar. And then, when he got out of high school, he started working at The American Dream. That was Bob Taylor. I was part of The American Dream until my wife, Janet, and I got married in January 1974. My wife had a job in Washington DC, so we left and went to Washington, and we were gone for 10 months. When we got back, Bob Taylor and Kurt Listug had bought out The American Dream and had started Taylor Guitars.
I worked for Taylor for just a few months. Instead of me paying them 20 percent and doing repair work and making custom banjos and stuff, they were paying me 20 percent. I was newly married, we had a brand new baby and we were starving. I started building a lot of banjo necks for converting old, pre-war tenor banjos to five-strings for a guy who had just moved to San Diego and who was a good banjo player. And then he came up with a new design for banjos, and he had me start making necks for him. But that was all through Taylor. I was only getting 20 percent, and it was hard.
So, one day, he came to me and said, “Let’s be partners.” And I said, “Well, let’s do that.” And so, I quit Taylor and became a partner with Geoff Stelling. We were making Stelling Banjos. We moved into his garage and started building the whole line up. This was around February 1975. And, by June 1975, we had the whole line fleshed out and we took them to the NAMM show in Chicago. When we got home from Chicago, Geoff and his wife sat down with Janet and I and said, “We don’t want to be partners. We don’t want to have a partner, and so we’re dissolving the partnership. But, we want you to start Deering Banjo Company, and we’ll contract with you to make banjos.”
So, around July 1975, we officially started Deering Banjo Company. That lasted until November 1977. Geoff had bought a shop building and I was renting part of the building from him. I had a crew of about nine people. We were making about 40 banjos a month. And Geoff came to me one day and said, “You shouldn’t be Deering Banjo Company. It should all be Stelling Banjo Works, and you should just be working for me.” And I said, “I’m not going to do that.” The next day, he cut my orders in half. So, I stayed up all night and built an Appalachian dulcimer and, when my crew came to work the next day, I put half my crew to work making dulcimers. I went out, got a bunch of orders for them and just kept on going.
Then, the day before Thanksgiving ’77, Geoff gave my wife Janet a letter saying that we had 30 days to vacate his building. And then, after Thanksgiving, when I came back to work, I found out that he had hired all my guys. But Geoff didn’t know that all the machinery was mine. We’d bought the house across the street from the shop, so we just moved everything into our garage and started over. By June 1978, we had a line of Deering banjos and we went to the Chicago NAMM show and started all over again. So, we built the first 600 Stelling banjos and, since then, at the 2014 NAMM show, we delivered our 100,000th Deering banjo. That’s more banjos than any American banjo company has ever made.
The Retailer: When you look at Deering Banjo Company as it exists right now, what would you say you’re the proudest of? Is there something you think makes the company stand apart not only from its direct competitors, but also from all companies in the music products industry? Is there a “secret sauce” that you can let us in on?
Deering: I’ve had just a couple of basic motivations. I don’t really know if they’re different, but they’re definitely our basic motivations. Well, number one, I understand that your basic motivations—and how correct they are—serve to form your foundation. And one of my basic motivations is I’ve always wanted to build a banjo that would have been the banjo I could have afforded back when I was a kid and I couldn’t afford a Pete Seeger banjo. I continually try to build that banjo that I could have afforded back then…build that for all the players who want a good banjo. And then, the other motivation we have is, we’re motivated by what our customers ask for.
Most of our competitors build what they think is a good product, and then they tell all the customers that that’s what they should have. We listen to our customers when they tell us what they want, and then we work hard to build that. And, because of that, we build more different kinds of banjos than any of our competitors. And we have a broader line than many people in other parts of our industry, including guitar companies or horn companies. We have a huge number of different models, and that’s because customers have wanted them. We’re pretty aggressive in our marketing, and we’re willing to do things that aren’t traditional. We had the first patent on a really workable electric banjo. When we first introduced that product, we got laughed at. We literally had music dealers at the NAMM show laughing at us. But, now, it’s a pretty mainstream instrument in the banjo world, other than in bluegrass. When Béla Fleck and the Dixie Chicks started playing that instrument, people quit laughing.
We’re still the only American company making a lower-priced banjo. We make some very high-end banjos…some expensive banjos…but we also make a low-priced banjo called the Goodtime. That’s part of my motivation: to make good banjos that people can afford.
The Retailer: What continues to inspire you, as someone who’s been in the music products industry for several decades, to keep coming to work each day? What keeps you motivated? What keeps you excited? What’s the best part of being in the office each day?
Deering: I’m inspired by making our products better and by making our products more efficiently. We’ve been able to keep our Goodtime banjo going for quite a while now, without having to raise our price. And I even want to be able to increase our profit margin while lowering the price. We’re getting better and more efficient in our manufacturing process. So, that kind of stuff just excites me to no end.
I’m also excited by our continually working on new products. We’ve just come out with a banjo ukulele that’s the first truly real banjo ukulele that’s been made in the last 80 years. We just expanded our Goodtime and our Vega line to include 12-inch rims…the drums. The normal size of the banjo drum is 11 inches. The 12-inch drum is becoming more popular. And I’ve got a whole other banjo that we’re working on that I’ve actually been working on for probably 10 years now.
It’s a radical new design for the drum. We just filed for patents on it last year, and the goal on that one is to break incredible price barriers on the low-end spectrum. We expect to have a banjo come out that will be way below anything we’re doing now, and that’ll be huge direct competition to the cheap stuff coming out of China. But, it’ll be a much, much better banjo.
It’s just really, really exciting stuff. And part of what’s exciting is that we have more resources…more capacity to pursue those things now than we’ve ever had before. So, it’s even more exciting. This last year, at the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) convention, we were presented with the Distinguished Achievement Award for our contributions to bluegrass music. When they told us we were getting the award, our first reaction was, “We’re not done yet! We’re just getting started!” When I have people helping me with building the factory and building machines and things like that, they’ll sometimes worry about whether or not I’ll need them anymore after we get this current job done. And I tell them, “We’re never gonna be out of things to do. No matter what we get done, there’s always going to be more to do.”
The Retailer: One of the hottest topics at the NAMM show had to do with murmurs about some prominent manufacturers possibly moving to direct-to-consumer sales. Tell me about Deering Banjo Company’s attitude relative to a strong partnership with the dealer channel. Is the dealer channel a fundamental element of your business model?
Deering: Well, our most basic, most fundamental approach to sales and marketing is to service the end customer and to leave no stone unturned in trying to reach, help and serve them. And we believe the dealer channel is a huge part of that. Back when we were working with Stelling, he sometimes lured customers from his dealers. We regarded that as bad business. Now, with guitars, you can walk into just about any store in the country and find a wide range of instruments from a variety of different brands to try. But, the very niche nature of the banjo means that, a lot of the time, our customers won’t find any banjos—let alone a Deering. So, at Deering Banjo Company, we do offer a direct service for those guys, but we don’t compete with our dealers. So, when we sell direct, we don’t discount at all. But that makes up a very small part of our business, and the majority still lies in us having a very strong dealer network carrying our banjos and representing our brand.
We also have a practice that, if somebody buys a banjo from us directly, we ask them who their favorite dealer is…where they go if they go to a brick-and-mortar music store. If that store is one of our dealers, we contact them and we give them a small commission for that sale. That’s worked really well for us over the years, and we have a lot of dealers who have enjoyed that commission that we pay them. A great many dealers are very delighted and happy with the program. We’re not ever going to turn away a banjo customer—ever. But, if we find out that he or she is a customer of one of our dealers, then the dealer gets included in the deal.
Now, in the last two years, our sales and marketing team has focused more on driving customers to the dealers and supporting them by making their lives a little easier. We utilize the services of Omacro, to which any of our dealers can sign up for free by visiting omacro.com. They’ll get real-time, 24/7 access to product information, images, pricing and training material. Everything is right there. We have also created training videos and literature going over the finer points of the banjos, and helping our dealers understand the products better when explaining them to customers. And, already this year, we have allowed customers looking at any product page on our Web site to see which of our dealers have that model in stock. Obviously, we constantly make recommendations of good banjo dealers in an area, and we have a very intuitive dealer finder on our Web site. But this really helps the customer to find out which dealer has stock of the product that he or she is interested in.
This is just the start. Our team is working on some really exciting initiatives coming up later this year.
The Retailer: Do you have any suggestions or constructive criticism for the dealer channel that you feel would not only help the dealers themselves, but also help Deering Banjo Company as their supplier?
Deering: Well, a lot of dealers still treat the banjo like it’s an orphan and nobody wants it. They hide the banjos. They put them behind counters. They hang them up on the wall where nobody can get to them. They don’t have anybody in the store who has a clue about how to tune the thing. They don’t know how to set them up. They don’t know how to talk intelligently to their customers about the banjo. The one thing that I’d like to see happen is for each store to have somebody in that store who can take care of the banjos and who’s able to talk to a customer on a knowledgeable level. And we have that kind of training available to any one of our dealers who wants it. We campaign for this constantly. I’ll go to a music store that hasn’t been selling a lot of banjos, and I’ll train all their staff, adjust all their banjos and clean them up. Then, I go home and—BOOM!—their banjos all sell. And then they start ordering more banjos.
We’ve got a number of stores that we’ve dealt with for years and years. They’re the type of store that sits behind the counter and waits for customers to walk in. They’ll usually say, “Well, there’s not much demand for banjos.” But, as soon as they get somebody in the store who can talk knowledgeably about banjos, all the customers come out of the woodwork. So, that’s the main thing we want to do, and we’re increasing our campaign to accomplish more of that. It used to be that I was the only one who would go out and do those workshops. But our Sales Manager, Barry Hunn, is an incredible musician, and he has more banjo in his blood than I do. He’s an incredibly good salesman, and we’re starting to get him out to do workshops and train up store staff to be able to talk to people about banjos.
The banjo market has expanded beyond its normal niche. We survived most of our years with the banjo market just being bluegrass, folk, old timey and Dixieland. They were tiny, little niche markets. But, in the last three or four years, it’s started expanding into all kinds of other music genres to where, now, our customer base is much larger than it used to be. It’s not the traditional customer base that it used to be. And there are people walking into music stores—people wanting to get a banjo—and they can’t find anybody who can talk to them about it and help them figure out what they need. And one of the reasons we’re really enjoying this new banjo ukulele we just made is we’re finding out there are many, many stores that are going to carry this banjo ukulele that were never otherwise going to carry a banjo.
So, we’re on a campaign to get retail music stores to quit treating the banjo like it’s an orphan that nobody wants and, instead, to embrace it for the beautiful instrument that it really is.
The Retailer: What is your sense of the relative strength—or weakness—of the broad music products market? In addition, what’s your assessment of the “orphan product” sub-segment of the market, whether it’s banjos, mandolins or any other lesser-publicized music product?
Deering: I’m an absolutely hopeless optimist. Life is all about making today better than yesterday, and making tomorrow better than today. And we need to never, ever, ever let that go. But I see the music industry starting to move into a new realm. Music is about the magic: it’s the magic of the music that draws people into it. The amount of magic that the music’s creating ebbs and tides a little bit, and I see it coming to a new high level. There’s more people reaching to try to become part of that magic. So, I think it’s going to get stronger. And I’m also one who really believes that almost the entirety of what we hear about how economies are bad should just be ignored. Because most of it is manipulated media that’s actually lying to us. If we just ignore them, then we’ll all prosper.
I’ve got a copy of a story that was written back during The Great Depression about selling hot dogs. It talks about listening to the naysayers, and how that’s what drives business down. If we don’t listen to them and just keep working, we’ll all be fine.
The Retailer: What can we expect as we watch Deering Banjo Company in the next six months? One year? Five years? What is the plan for the future, and what can we look forward to?
Deering: Well, historically, the modern banjo was first invented by Joel Sweeney in 1840. And, from 1840 to the late 1920s or early 1930s, the banjo had the position in our popular music that the guitar has now. Because, prior to amplification, the banjo worked much better on stage than the guitar did. And it was the main instrument in all the popular music forms all through that long period of time…a period of about 90 years. What knocked the banjo out of that position was Les Paul and the development of the electric guitar. And my goal is not necessarily to see the banjo dethrone the electric guitar but, at least, to be right up next to it again…to be a truly mainstream instrument in popular music. And it’s quickly heading in that direction. And we intend for our instruments and our efforts to help that along.
We have also been very proactive over the last several years in surrounding ourselves with the best team we possibly can to ensure a bold and bright future for the company and for the instrument. Our daughter, Jamie, has already set her sights high for the future of Deering. But from R&D, to sales and marketing, to production, we have some great people with us, including the recent addition of our first full-time engineer! So, we know that Deering is going to be in great hands for the next 40 years!
The Retailer: Is there anything that I’ve forgotten to ask you that you’d like to discuss?
Deering: We have the goal of putting the banjo back on top, rather than just being the forgotten orphan instrument. Janet and I wrote down our goals and purposes for the company way back in the early ’80s, and one of the things that we wrote down was that we wanted every man, woman and child in the world to know, love and, in as many cases as possible, play a banjo. And we’re just going to keep pursuing that. It doesn’t mean they can’t play guitar; they can still play their guitar. We don’t want anyone to stop playing anything else. But we want them to include in their arsenal that they play the banjo. There’s room for everybody.