Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Chazz Bessette. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Chazz, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.
In the world of musical instrument sales there has long been a certain machismo attitude that permeates most of the retail culture and advertising. My background has a lot of turns that intersect but didn’t always meet gracefully – working for guitar builders and vintage guitar shops and also growing up as a teenaged songwriter in a queer female fronted band with a loyal following showed two extreme ends of a spectrum. I always thought walking into a music store should be a pleasant experience for anyone and wanted to work to close that gap.
When my wife Naomi and I decided to step out on our own and create a music school/store our own way we really didn’t have any other direct influences to look to. Most of our aesthetic inspiration came from 60’s and 70’s looks with a bright color palette and a cast of anthropomorphic sunflowers called the flower friends – smiley flower, lazy daisy, learning flower, frowny flower and others. Naomi creates much of the art and characters and runs the music school (long time graphic designer and touring musician/violin teacher) and I do most of the new and vintage instrument sourcing and restoration.
We really want to create a space that respects the old world knowledge and expertise with vintage instruments and restoration without all of the toxic macho narrative that is so often found. Our place is an all inclusive space built from a completely grass roots one-piece-at-a-time mentality with a big focus on nurturing the local music community.
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Chazz, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Sunflower and Friends is a vintage guitar store/vintage hifi shop/repair shop/music school in the small town of Lockhart Texas just 30 minutes south of Austin. We bring old world knowledge and services to an all inclusive fun space filled with color and positive atmosphere. All teachers and employees here are veterans of the music scene with venue or performing and touring experience.
We put a big emphasis on restorations of found and donated vintage instruments and finding perfect pairings with our eclectic selection and the eclectic creative humans who come through our doors.
Our music school serves students of nearly all ages focusing on guitar, keys, ukulele, bass, drums, vocals, violin and cello.
We are also one of the few shops in the area servicing antique recording and hifi equipment such as reel to reel tape recorders, vintage microphones and arcane tube and solid state equipment. We even have a cassette tape label that focuses on local musician releases!
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
We opened our first line of business about 3 years ago starting with our repair shop and music lessons – we had really cashed in all of our chips to move to Lockhart and had to start from a very small seed. It was scary but we hung in there and eventually folks began to come to support. Around 2 years ago we were able to finish building out our proper store front in the big yellow victorian house we live in – this took every bit of resource squeezing we could muster. This all was made much more difficult with the global pandemic hitting. Between the 3 arms of our business (Retail store, music school and repair shop) we were able to keep the lights on. There were times when we could not operate our retail shop but we were able to do curbside repair drop offs and pick ups and pivot to teaching remotely. None of this was ideal based on our plans to grow but we were able to survive. A big part of being resilient is not having any options but to succeed – when you have no safety net you had better keep on the balance beam.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
Our business was started without any sort of loans or traditional proper funding at all. A lot of our starting inventory were items collected by myself or my father. He was a big help in getting us started by showing support and gifting many items to the cause of starting the shop up. Coming from modest musician backgrounds we literally had only saved up a few thousand dollars and took it from there. There was a lot of re-investment into build out that would have to wait if we didn’t make a few bucks for a while. Then we would have bigger days and weeks that would launch us forward a few squares – it was hard to predict exactly how and when we would be able to push forward! I don’t know if I would suggest to anyone reading this to avoid a fair loan agreement to start their business. If anything I would say that starting as modestly as we did built a lot of character and strength and really got us into the mindset of survival no matter what that is hard to simply buy into.
Image Credits
Chazz Emile Bessette, Naomi Cherie Bessette