Saxholder from Jazzlab
During a conversation about our recently launched shop in Bristol, a friend asked me:
“What’s your best selling product”
which shamefully I couldn’t answer straight away, but after some deliberation I came to the following conclusion.
It’s really hard to isolate one product as being your ‘best seller’ because it depends how you measure ‘best’, if we’re talking about unit quantity then the answer would certainly be reeds, but reeds are as crucial to a saxophonist as they are disposable so I don’t think this qualifies them as being the best. If we’re looking purely at the revenue then it would probably be a popular pro Yanagisawa or Yamaha saxophone, but does this make them the ‘best seller’? one Yamaha 62 tenor yields as much revenue as the best part of a lifetime of reeds for an amateur sax player so that’s probably not a fair metric to use when defining 'best'.
Which got me thinking about a product we continually underestimate the demand for in the shop, the ‘Saxholder’ from Jazzlab. So we haven’t sold as many Saxholders as we’ve sold boxes of Rico orange box reeds and they haven't generated more revenue than even one Yanagisawa 992 tenor saxophone (yet). However, I have had nothing but positive experiences recommending this product and almost every customer who has bought one and subsequently returned to the shop has commented on how pleased they are with this outstanding invention.
For those of you who haven’t come across one of these, it’s basically an alternative to a conventional sling or harness which hooks over both your shoulders while simultaneously pressing back against your abdomen taking the weight and pressure of the saxophone away from the your neck (as you find with a regular sling) and diverting it to much stronger, more muscular parts of your body that don’t buckle under the constant strain from hours of practise.
I began to use a ‘Saxholder’ around 2 years ago after experiencing recurring numbness in my neck from long practise sessions and experienced the benefits immediately, no neck pain meant more practise - woohoo!
So when customers tell me that they are struggling with the weight of the instrument on their neck and ask:
“is there something I can use that will help take the weight of the saxophone?”
I can give them solid consumer advice drawn from my own experiences.
But most of the time I just hand them a Saxholder and a saxophone and wait for that epiphany I experienced myself. This thing needs no explanation, just a simple demonstration.
Admittedly this is quite a bit more expensive than a bog standard sax sling, but in the grand scheme of things at just over 40 quid it is honestly worth every penny, and I have a long list of customers who will back me up on that.
So for me, based on consistent customer satisfaction, relative volume / revenue ratio, and the fact that this ingenious design has given me hours upon hours of pain free practise time that I would not otherwise have had, the ‘Saxholder’ by Jazzlab is by far our best selling product to date.
However, Ben is working on a design on sax harness that along with the conventional functionality also holds two beers, a selection of ninja stars and automatically downloads an RSS feed of Michael Brecker transcriptions straight to your smartphone. So depending how that pans out we may need to reallocate the ‘best selling product’ title in the near future.
To browse our range of sxophone accesories, come and visit our showroom at 19 Zetland Rd, Brisol, BS6 7AH or call us on 0117 907 0493
