OUR BUSINESS MODEL

At 31 March 2024 we listed over 63,000 products from 1,096 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 5,300 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 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.

Our Service

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 FY24 we employed 484 people 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 2024 we had 1.83m people registered to receive our email communications, up 11% from 1.65m at 31 March 2023.

Active customers of 0.80m (being customers who have purchased from Gear4music during the previous 12 months), are down 8% on FY23 (0.86m), broadly in line with sales. The Group acquired a further 0.67m new customers in the period (FY23: 0.74m), and 0.16m customers returned to place at least one follow-up order (FY23: 0.17m).

Average order value of £153 was marginally up on FY23 (£150) reflecting cost price inflation.

Customer engagement

Effective communication with our customers is central to understanding their needs and wants, and developing our customer proposition. We monitor and respond to Trustpilot reviews, and look to learn from things that didn’t meet the customer’s expectation.

We invest significant resource in generating high quality engaging content, in terms of product descriptions, and studio quality photographic and video content.

Improving customer experience is a key objective when designing and implementing software development projects.

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 21 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 23 different delivery service providers, to provide our customers with a class-leading range of delivery options.