for the customer experience, and so even when you acquire a company, and it’s made public that you’ve acquired a company, people fear, ‘Oh, well, is it going to change from how it used to be?’” Montague explained. “But, the one thing that we’ve always done and have always been consistent with is we made sure that we don’t want to change anything. We want to support the team inside the business, and we wanted to support the customers.” FROM LONDON TOWN TO MUSIC CITY Montague is no stranger to the music scene or running a music business. A former singer-songwriter, Montague — alongside his father — founded TNAG in 2010 to import U.S. luthier- made guitars into the U.K. “We were really the first company to take a luthier and say, ‘We’re going take five of your build spots this year, and we’re going to market them on our website so customers can see those, and then we can help custom-build instru- ments,’” Montague said. “We would take these small workshop brands that were creating sometimes 10 or 20, maximum 30, guitars a year, and we would agree to take five or 10 of their instruments and market them in the U.K. to a wider group of customers.” But around 2018, Montague said he noticed a difference in his cus- tomer base. “I was seeing that I was buying a lot of instruments from the U.S. and bringing them to the U.K., and then I was sending them right back to the U.S., so my customer base was building up in America,” he said. “That made me start thinking, ‘How do I adjust my business model to suit both U.S. and U.K. customers?’” Then, in 2019, as Montague was heading back to the U.K. from The 2019 NAMM Show in Anaheim, California, he received an offer he couldn’t refuse. “I received an email from a really well-known client of ours who told me there was an opportunity in Nashville and asked if I was interested, and I said, ‘Absolutely!’ I jumped on a plane and met the very wonderful Kim Sherman, who was the owner of Cotten Music at the time and is now the managing partner of our busi- ness,” he said. “One reason I liked
her business was because we shared a lot of alignment with what we were doing from a customer standpoint. We laughed at the fact that we were both customer-obsessed because we both wanted to make sure that the customer journey, from the person consigning a guitar to the person who’s buying it, was always impeccable. We realized that it would be beneficial for us to open up a North American Guitar, Nashville, LLC, so, that’s what we did. We acquired Cotten Music, then put Cotten into The North American Guitar, Nashville LLC. That was the first transition into the U.S.” During COVID, it became apparent to Montague that it would be more beneficial to have the company’s opera- tions based in Nashville as the major- ity of the luthiers were U.S.-based. “So, we made Nashville our main operations, and we kept the U.K. as a sort of smaller entity,” he explained. “So, it almost reversed our original operations workflow. And then, in 2021, my family and I moved to the U.S. and in 2022, we merged with Walter and Christie at Carter Vin- tage Guitars.” CUSTOMER-OBSESSED SERVICE Montague said he was a massive fan of Carter Vintage Guitars from afar and read many of Walter’s books on vintage guitars, so when the opportu- nity to purchase the dealership came up, he couldn’t say “no.” “We just shared so many of the same values in the way that we handled our customers,” he said. “We were just in a slightly differ- ent market. I mean, it’s the same, but different. We were doing more of the boutique, custom-build, and our consignment model was more on the sort of smaller workshop side of things. And Carter Vintage Guitars was selling those instruments, but they were much deeper into the vintage market. While we would sell vintage instruments, we weren’t in any way selling as much as they were. And so it felt like there were these two businesses had so much alignment.” Montague said it had always been a long-term plan to take The North American Guitar, Cotten Music and Carter Vintage Guitars and meld them into one retail operation.
THE VINTAGE PULSE
Ben Montague, the owner of Carter Vintage Guitars, breaks down the current state of the vintage guitar market. With an inventory ratio of about 85% pre-owned versus 15% new, Carter Vintage Guitars’ owner Ben Montague has his finger on the pulse of the vintage guitar market. As someone who’s been buying and selling guitars since his university days, Montague said the state of the vin- tage market can oftentimes change depending on who you ask, but the one thing that has remained consistent for Carter Vintage has been the premium vintage market. “We’ve seen premium instruments continue to be looked at as an asset class,” he said. “You can invest in a premium vintage instrument, and it will hold its value depending on how well you look after it. The difference is that you can enjoy that asset, right? We’ve certainly seen some incredible pieces come through. We had a 1935 shade top that came in the other day. We sold another 1960 Les Paul, and all of them continuously hit record prices. So, we’re definitely seeing a trend that these in - struments are holding value and increasing.” When it comes to the lower-tier, Montague said he’s seeing the COVID-induced guitar bubble now flowing through into the secondhand market. “I think overall I would say the vintage market is very strong,” he added. “It consistently grows as an asset class, and we’re incredibly proud to see some of the most iconic instruments regularly brought into our store.” What’s the coolest instrument Montague has seen come through Carter Vintage Guitars’ doors? “I was lucky enough to be a part of the sale of [a] 1959 factory black Les Paul,” Montague said. “And that was, without a doubt, the most awe-inspiring instrument I’ve ever seen. What I loved about it so much was that it came from the family of a gentleman and wife who consigned it with us. It was his father’s guitar, and his father, when he bought it, couldn’t afford the additional upgrade to make it a sunburst. Yet that was the thing that made it just so unique and so beautiful.” MI
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