R Retail Excellence Awards
PAIGE’S MUSIC Fishers, Indiana
Founded: 1871 Principals: Mark Goff, owner, and Jeremy McQueary, president and CEO Locations: 2 Employees: 65 nity. Its educational representatives travel to hundreds of Indiana schools each week, consulting with B&O directors, delivering instruments and picking up repairs. “We go top to bottom, coast to coast,” McQueary said. “We go all the way up to the Michigan-Indiana border, all the way down to the Kentucky-Indiana border, and then to Ohio and Illinois — and that’s just out of our Fishers location. Last year, we added a second location in Corydon, In- diana, and with that facility, we now go down into north-central Kentucky.” Because of the new expansive space, Paige’s has been able to broaden its product offerings and enhance the customer experi- ence even further. “We have multiple places in the building that we can hold not only clinics, but edu- cational events,” McQueary said. “We’ll bring in college students, high school stu- dents, and we do Paige’s University in our building now, where we bring in a bunch of music ed students and teach them the things that they’re not learning in school.” The community response since the fa- cility’s opening has been overwhelmingly positive. With more space and streamlined processes, Paige’s can now fulfill customer needs faster than ever before, as the shop has a strict one-week turnaround for its typical repairs. “First and foremost, this facility is about serving our customers more efficiently,” McQueary said. “From day one, we’ve been trying to find ways to use this facility to better serve them, whether it’s through the products and services we provide, or whether it’s just how we do our process. Our goal is to continue to work to earn the trust of music educators so that we contin- ue to win new accounts and earn that busi- ness. We also spend a lot of time looking at our processes to make them more efficient. We want to be as efficient as we can while still serving the directors and parents at the highest level possible.” MI
Jeremy McQueary
GROWING SPACE, BETTER SERVICE A little over two years ago, Paige’s Music opened a new facility dedicated to student service. Since then, the space has increased efficiency and streamlined operations. — By Kimberly Kapela
F ishers, Indiana-based Paige’s Music marked a major milestone in Septem- ber 2023 with the opening of a new fa- cility dedicated to student service. For near- ly two decades, Paige’s operated out of its original facility, which could no longer meet the demands of its expanding operations. “We’ve been at our old facility for about 20 years, and honestly, we had just outgrown it,” said Jeremy McQueary, pres- ident and CEO of Paige’s Music. “We had a limited amount of shelving that had to be used for multiple purposes. Sometimes it was for available inventory, sometimes it was for items ready to be shipped and sometimes for instruments that needed to be prepped. We needed that same shelf for all three things at the same time. We’d be tripping over each other and really wouldn’t be able to be as efficient as we needed to be.” Over the last eight years, Paige’s has seen substantial growth across its student rental market and step-up instrument of- ferings. And voting suppliers have taken notice, with one calling it a “bold step.” “We’ve grown in our student rental
market, and we’ve also focused heavily on step-ups,” McQueary explained. “Now we look back and try to figure out how we did it in the old facility.” HONING REPAIRS One area that’s benefited greatly from the expansion is the company’s repair operation. “We rented an off-site storage to house our summer repairs that were coming in,” McQueary said. “So, we’d have to shuttle them back and forth between an off-site warehouse and our shop to fix them, and then they would have to go back before we could deliver them to schools. Now they’re in the warehouse right next to our shop.” In June and July 2024 alone, Paige’s repair team serviced more than 7,000 in- struments. “You can imagine the logisti- cal nightmare it was putting those in a van, driving them three blocks, unloading them, fixing them, then putting them back in, driving them back over and putting them back on the shelf without losing any- thing,” McQueary said. Paige’s success also stems from its deep connection to the school music commu-
48 I MUSIC INC. I DECEMBER 2025
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