Gear4Music

Gear4music (Holdings) plc

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Gear4music (Holdings) plc

About us
Our Business Model

OUR BUSINESS MODEL

Gear4music is an online retailer of musical instruments and music equipment, operating 21 websites in 15 languages and 9 currencies.

Gear4music is about making quality music gear more accessible and affordable for all musicians.

At the year-end we listed over 64,200 products from over 1,130 manufacturers.

Branded Products

Gear4music has developed long-term partnerships with many well recognised brands within the music products industry, who rely on the specialist product knowledge of Gear4music’s staff, the high standard of customer service that Gear4music provides, and the high standard of presentation both online and at the Gear4music showrooms.

Own-brand Products

On-going development of Gear4music’s own-brand product range has been a focus since Gear4music.com was launched in 2003, and now covers a wide and varied range with over 4,900 products listed.

In 2021 Gear4music acquired the Eden and Premier brands respectively, and we continue to explore opportunities to acquire legacy brands.

Audio Visual Products

Since January 2022 the Group offers a range of audio-visual products via its AV.com site, including home cinema systems, HiFi systems, speakers, cables, headphones and accessories.

We believe that achieving a very high degree of customer satisfaction is fundamental to sustained long term growth, and we are committed to continually improving the service experienced by our customers.

We leverage our technology and empower our specialist staff to ensure key touch points deliver a market leading experience, and monitor our progress carefully using independent sources such as Trustpilot.

Specialist Staff

In FY23 we employed 573 people (FY22: 558) across five countries, and many have first-hand musical instrument and equipment knowledge, playing in bands and producing their own music. Ongoing product training is routinely undertaken to ensure staff have relevant and up-to-date knowledge to enable them to advise customers.

Multilingual support for overseas customers in non-English speaking countries continues to be a key investment focus, and a pre-requisite for many of the Group’s dealership agreements when selling outside the UK.

Gear4music’s customer base is primarily made up of private individuals (over 96%), from beginners and parents buying musical instruments and music equipment for their children, through to professional musicians. The Group supplies schools and other educational establishments and a small number of trade accounts.

On 31 March 2023 we had 1.65m million people registered to receive our email communications, up 29% from 1.28m at 31 March 2022, and 0.98m at 31 March 2021.

Active customers of 0.86m (being customers who have purchased from Gear4music during the previous 12 months), are down 6% on FY22 (0.92m). The Group acquired a further 0.74m new customers in the period (FY22: 0.79m), and 0.17m customers returned to place at least one followup order (FY22: 0.17m).

Average order value of £150 was up on FY22 (£125) reflecting cost price inflation and as relatively more, higher priced other-branded products were sold.

 

We believe a successful e-commerce business requires a unique combination of talented staff, excellent products, efficient systems, robust physical operations and reliable delivery partners.

Staff

We have a strong, committed and experienced management team, working alongside passionate staff with in-depth knowledge of their specialist area of focus.

Products

Our own-brand product ranges have taken over 20 years to develop, working with some of the best manufacturers from around the world to ensure we build on our reputation for great quality at affordable prices. In addition, we have built strong relationships with the industry’s biggest brand names, including Yamaha, Roland, Fender and many more.

Premises

The Group currently operates from 370,000 square feet of operational space – 160,000 square feet across two sites in the UK, 77,000 square feet in Sweden, 72,000 square feet in Germany, 46,000 square feet in Spain and 15,000 square feet in Ireland.

Our 50,000 square feet freehold head office provides back-office facilities sufficient to support the business into the long term.

Systems

Our bespoke and proprietary e-commerce platform is an end-to-end solution covering all aspects of retail operations, including website content, inventory management, multi-currency pricing, logistics and dispatch, CRM, automated marketing, purchasing, customer receipts and management reporting.

We believe this platform is a cornerstone of our business and source of competitive advantage, delivering reliability, scalability and unique functionality, and we have an in-house team of dedicated programmers constantly improving our systems with new features and functionality.

Delivery

Reliable delivery with competitive pricing is fundamental to our proposition and success. Our e-commerce platform is configured to select the most cost-effective delivery options from 20 different delivery service providers, to provide our customers with a class-leading range of delivery options.