Marshall Music’s President Jimmy Edwards stands in the showroom of his Lansing, Michigan-location — one of seven across the state.
“It’s sort of like this sacred thing you don’t really disturb, you know?” Edwards said. “And, we did [the rental process] the same way pretty much every year, and I think the music programs we had worked with appreciated that consistency. But, we said, ‘Let’s kind of upset that a little bit and try for this service online.’ Again, I think the feeling among our team was that folks were doing a lot of other things online by then — and not just making simple purchases, but they were having all kinds of different interactions online. So, why not also complete their rental online?” AN ONLINE EVOLUTION By 2018, the point-of-sales system Marshall Music was using was in the early stages of being able to facilitate online rentals, so that same year, the full-line dealer leaned into the process. Edwards said the store normally rents out some 10,000 instruments each school year to some 700 schools. In the first year, it saw several hundred be completed online. “At that point, the online rentals were a very small amount of the rentals we were doing,” he said. “In some districts or ac- counts that we work with, maybe a few of the parents were trying the online option while the rest of them were showing up to the in-person event. We’re just kind of put- ting our toe in the water and trying to get an understanding of the logistics involved.
How do we get this rental from a computer screen to the customer? Are they going to pick it up in-store? Are we going to deliver it to the school? Normally, it had been handed right across a little table to them.” By 2019, Marshall Music had fine-tuned its internal systems and, instead of promot- ing it heavily, continued to offer online as an option, which eventually lead to about 10% of its total rental volume being completed online. Then COVID hit and the 2020 rental season was flipped again. “When COVID happened, we not only had to deal with the panic mode of incoming rental returns, but we also had to think about how we were going to do fall 2020’s rental season,” Edwards explained. “Factors in our region lead us to believe that close contact in a group setting with a bunch of kids was going to be out of the question as far as we knew, but business had to continue. Rentals are our bread and butter. It’s 80–90% of our revenue stream. Even if our stores weren’t able to be open, we had to be able to maintain that rental business. So, a small group of us rolled up our sleeves and we turned a third of our retail showroom — and we have a 30,000-square-foot facility — into an online rental fulfillment center where we tried to do as many of the rentals that we could online.” Edwards credited his innovative team as one of the reasons the online rental system
was adopted so quickly and successfully. “Fortunately, our team has always been committed to innovation,” he said. “But, the institutions and schools we work with, they change at a snail’s pace and, sometimes, not at all. We had to be sensitive to that, and we couldn’t necessarily say, ‘Well, here’s a whole new system.’ So, we were always looking for ways of how we could do things a little dif- ferently. How could we still keep the spirit of customer service that we’ve had for 75 years throughout this new innovative process?” In response, Marshall Music hired a dedi- cated director of innovation and technology whose job it was to continuously look for better ways to take care of Marshall’s custom- ers, while supporting the company’s team. Determined to save its business during the thick of the pandemic, Marshall Music got some 4,000 rentals out the door via online in the fall of 2020. “We were able to do some amount of deliv- ery in our stores where the customers could get them, but even at that point, customers were pretty apprehensive about leaving their homes, certainly in Michigan, so, we fumbled through that process the first year,” Edwards explained. “And, I should mention that at this time, we still weren’t saying, ‘the online rental is the future for Marshall Music.’ We were just thinking of survival.” But after successfully getting through
38 I MUSIC INC. I JUNE 2024
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