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| About Us - a small business with a big passion for quality guitars |
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Meet The Boss guitars4you is owned lock stock and barrel by Mark Hopkin, whose experience in the retail guitar business goes all the way back to 1978, when he started full time in the family business, Wisher (Derby) Ltd, helping to establish it as a successful, popular and knowledgeable music shop. Following the sale of Wishers to Carlsbro Retail in the late 80s, I continued to work with the new owners for a few years as the Derby branch manager. In the early 90s Mark Hopkin Guitar Gallery was born in Derby, a small retail outlet, with a reputation for selling quality guitars throughout the UK and Europe. A few years later this merged into Play it Again Sam (which was part of the Academy of Sound chain). I then spent a number of years working for AOS as branch manager and later became part of the senior company management – whilst gaining tremendous business knowledge and experience, I became totally disillusioned working for a corporate company, buying and selling many ‘bland corporate’ products. The desire to leave and start my own business was hatched, and in the summer of 2004, 2 years after the birth of my daughter, guitars4you was born. Around 30 years spent in the guitar retail business means my playing may have suffered, with little spare time available to develop it. However my knowledge and experience developed over the same period of time, gives me the ability to run my business in the manner I believe is important to you, the customer. Key ingredients are the quality of the stock, good customer service, integrity, a vast product knowledge and a competitive price. However as any good chef will tell you, it takes more than just good ingredients to make a good meal, its knowing how to blend them all together and that is what I feel we are able to offer at guitars4you. Lets hope you agree. |
What Is Our Pride And Passion First of all, please do not get the wrong idea about us being guitars snobs or just offering boutique guitars at expensive prices. We offer premium quality guitars, with a very friendly down to earth service, whether you are a professional guitarist, a collector or an enthusiastic hobbyist. Our relationship with our suppliers is paramount to the success of our business, as we need to ensure that the guitars we buy for stock are amongst the finest examples available. With this in mind, we tend to offer a small selection of different guitar brands available, however we support those brands to a larger degree than other retailers. This policy then allows us to be one of the major players for that brand within the UK. For example we carry around 65 PRS Guitars in stock at any one time. Buying a premium quality guitar is about the pride of ownership, the tone, the playing performance and the magic X factor – we all know what the X factor is when we pick-up a particular guitar and it somehow just delivers the goods, yet we can not always put this emotion into words. The right guitar, almost talks back to you, responding to the emotion you are trying to achieve – pick it gently and the guitar purrs, pick it hard and it growls. Remember, the right guitar will enrich your playing performance to give you years of pleasure and in many cases, will then be worth more than the original purchase price
Flick through our web site and look at our guitar stock. You will see that we offer for sale many guitars not found on the corporate high street. We are always looking to buy and sell new or used premium grade instruments including custom shop models, vintage replicas, historic collection, rare or limited edition guitars along with a few quirky items from the past. Our web site is our shop window, or our showroom and is designed to enable you to view our stock profile, with accurate descriptions and good photos of each instrument. This information and evaluation is not generated by a computer stock list, but from our vast knowledge, experience and integrity. More product information is available, if not listed on the web site itself, just by giving us a telephone call, or sending an e-mail and in the event of us not knowing the answer, we will endeavour to find out for you. Our web site is fresh, with updates for both new deliveries and guitars sold, almost carried out on a daily basis. Finally, we may have a small business with regard to the physical size of the showroom, the number of staff employed or even the lack of 100’s of far Eastern budget guitars carried in stock, but we are a professional, caring, quality guitar business. In short, you are dealing directly with me, my reputation and everything that goes with it. Thank you - Mark Hopkin |
about
us
Our
showroom is nice and clean allowing you the opportunity to compare guitars in a
peaceful surrounding. We do not have a noisy, dirty or cluttered high
street showroom, no pushy sales staff and certainly do not offer dusty, scruffy,
finger marked, poorly set up guitars for sale – have you noticed how most of
the high street stores do – see our