We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Charlie Fox. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Charlie below.

Alright, Charlie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s talk legacy – what sort of legacy do you hope to build?

After spending nearly 2 and a half decades in the consumer electronics industry on what was essentially a “corporate” level, I found myself about 15 years from retirement and feeling like I had not and could not accomplish anything of significance in the remainder of my career. The projects I was working on had become rather repetitive, there were no positions above mine to move into and the pay had stagnated since the economic downturn of 2008. So, I left my comfy job and started two companies in order to be able to accomplish something that I felt could become significant: to manufacture high quality products in our category and to use US-based labor and components as much as possible.

The stated goals of the companies are to show love to musicians by building products that they actually want to use and to make the very finest gear we possibly can at a fair price.

In the end, I hope that the legacy of the two companies are that we made a positive impact on the industry by introducing innovative products and that we developed strong relationships with our clients and distributors while bringing jobs into our local community and in other communities as well.

Charlie, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I grew up in Nashville, surrounded my music and musicians and then obtained an engineering degree in the early 90s. I eventually landed a job at a consumer electronics manufacturer doing technical sales and later moved into the research and development department. At the same time, I started learning live sound as a volunteer and eventually developed a side-career in that industry as a mix tech.

As an engineer, I’m always looking for solutions to solve issues that I see as “problems” in order to make things better for musicians and audio techs alike. I noticed that many of the products that we now make, weren’t really designed to integrate well with other devices that guitar and bass players use regularly at that time. So we set about finding ways to adapt and improve upon the look, feel and function of those products that nearly every musician might use and make them integrate better in hopes that by making better solutions that it would in turn inspire players to perform at higher levels. We also try and take ideas from other industries and adapt and meld those together in order to make new and innovative products in the live sound industry..

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

When the companies first started, we approached several music and guitar stores here in the US in order to try to get them to sell and distribute the products. I heard a LOT of “no” and got a lot of “advice” on what we should be making that didn’t make a lot of sense to me, based on my experience with similar products. I also heard a lot of people say “I can’t sell a product that costs XX”. (If you say you *can’t*, you aren’t likely to even try!).

Eventually, I just set about marketing and selling products on our website. Sales were very slow. But we kept working on developing new products and eventually hit upon one that was a different idea that was based on a client’s special request. We did a lot of listening tests with the client and found a significant improvement over existing products in our industry. One by one, we built relationships with individual customers and eventually made some contacts with influential musicians who believed in what we were trying to accomplish and our unique approach. We later started shipping to other countries also: first to Canada, then to Australia and eventually to Europe and Asia as well. We are currently still making most of our US sales via our website, but we also have 8 international distributors…and counting!

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

As stated before, we believe in showing love to musicians and trying to help solve problems with our products. But sometimes it is beneficial to build relationships with a particular community by just helping to solve problems with a bit of advice. Instagram and Facebook groups are two formats that have made a way for us to find people that need a bit of technical advice and have no other place to turn to. Sometimes they can get help from a manufacturer, but other times, the issue is just interfacing two different products and the manufacturers don’t have the knowledge, time or other resources to help. In many circumstances, it is just a matter of having the experience or knowledge of knowing how to interpret the information given on the manufacturers website or the owners manual and how that applies in the situation.

Now, in many social media groups, advertising products is a no-no and will get you kicked out quickly. But if the admins see that we are trying to be helpful to the community at large, even if it isn’t anything to do with our products at all, they will let us bend those rules….sometimes to the point of just breaking them!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.pinstripepedals.com, www.slowgearelectronics.com
• Instagram: @pinstripepedals, @slowgearlelectronics
• Facebook: @pinstripepedals

Image Credits
Laura Northcutt Photography