King of String

“It all started in Ann Arbor where I was finishing graduate school and my partner [Sharon Burton] was finishing community college,” explained Stan Werbin, president of Elderly Instruments. “It was 1971, and both of us were at wits’ end as to what to do next. Because I played banjo and guitar, I said, ‘The instruments being made nowadays aren’t nearly as good as the old ones.’ I knew that much. I said, ‘My understanding is you can find pretty good old instruments for not a whole lot of money and fix them up and sell them.’ So we said, ‘Okay, sure, why not?’“

It was while they were scouring the classifieds that they not only found instruments but a name as well.

"Someone had put an ad in the Ann Arbor News to sell an old Les Paul guitar, and they called it, ˜a nice elderly instrument,'" Werbin recalled. "We'd been looking for a name, and we said, 'We'll take that.'"

Eventually, the duo collected 30 or 40 instruments, but found they were gathering more than they were selling. They thought about opening a store, but it wasn't until meeting Curious Book Shop owner Ray Walsh at an Ann Arbor flea market that the idea became a reality.

“He said, ‘Hey, you guys have cool stuff here. Have you ever thought about opening a store?’ We said, ‘Yes, we have.’ ‘Well, up in East Lansing, there’s a place I think you could rent for $60 a month,’ and we could afford that, just barely. We had a bit of a slow start, but it picked up fairly quickly. The only advertising we did was fliers around town. But we started attracting people from all over the place because we did have some things that were fairly unique. We managed to eke out a living and being able to eat,” Werbin explained.

As the couple figured out music industry politics, they eventually added new instruments due to customer demand. Then, in 1974, they decided to reach a larger audience by adding a mail order business.

“We published a 100-plus page mail order catalog and started taking ads in national magazines,” said Werbin. “We can do mail order with an infinite number of people, so it broadened our marketplace and allowed us to really become a much bigger music store in our specialization than we could have otherwise.”

By 1982, the business, now with around 25 employees, had grown to such an extent that it needed a larger site.

“We got lucky,” said Werbin. “We found the IOOF Hall (International Organization of Oddfellows) here in north Lansing. We managed to buy the building, renovated it for a price we could afford, and moved in. Meanwhile, my partner and I split up as a couple in 1980. We stayed in the business as partners until 1986 at which point she sold out to me. Around 1994, we bought the Aviso building [next door], and, as a consequence, we expanded considerably more. We went from 5,000 square feet in East Lansing to 13,000 to 14,000 square feet in 1982 and then took a jump to 30,000 or 40,000 square feet. All of a sudden, we got a whole lot more space; and, sure enough, we’re pretty much out of space right now.”

While Elderly Instruments was taking off, so was another relatively new concept—the Internet. One of Werbin’s employees had been experimenting with websites and had put one together for the store. Werbin admitted that he didn’t know much about it at the time, but he looked at a sample and thought, “Why not?” So in the mid-1990s, Elderly Instruments went online. Now that employee has a full-time job managing the website.

“One really good thing for us about taking orders over the Internet was that it was really just the mail order business all over again, and we knew how to do that,” Werbin explained. “We knew how to ship things. We had boxes to ship things. We weren’t a retail store that decided to go into the mail order business. We already knew how to do it. It was just a different way of taking orders. We still publish our mail order catalog, but the website at this point is the driving force. It’s very dramatic because we’ll put some used instruments up, get them priced, and then the next morning by 9:30 they’re sold to somebody in Japan or Germany or California. Basically, it’s a daily occurrence.”

Werbin noted that while the newer music getting airplay has moved away from guitars, there are still strong subgroups that have their own musical communities.

“There are niche kinds of music, the stuff you don’t hear on the radio, by and large, partly because of the Internet and even because of the demographics of the people who listen to it,” he said. “It’s quite strong these days. Next week, I’m going down to the International Bluegrass Association Trade Show and Festival in Kentucky where we’ll exhibit. It’s the premiere bluegrass festival in the country. All of the professionals are down there as well as a lot of fans. It’s nothing next to hip hop, but at the same time, it’s pretty substantial. There are many thousands of people around the world who listen to that kind of music, who play that kind of music, who buy things related to that kind of music. Last week, I was at the East Coast Ukulele Expo. It’s a pretty small subculture next to bluegrass, for instance, but it’s a fairly vibrant one. There are subcultures of Cajun music and Irish music. We just gravitate toward those subcultures.”

It helps that Elderly Instruments carries the items those subcultures are most likely to use.

“We specialize in guitars and related things,” said Werbin. “Acoustic and electric guitars, basses, amplifiers, banjos, mandolins, ukuleles and most fairly common folk instruments, dulcimers and autoharps. We make sure we’ve got a good depth of those things and know a lot about them. Our main thing is guitars and related fretted instruments.”

Werbin also noted that Elderly Instruments has the staff to both refurbish the used instruments and to prepare the new ones.

“The older instruments often need a lot of work, whereas the new ones usually need to be tweaked,” he said. “Our repair staff is really very important here. It keeps the quality to a high level. At least half of them can do pretty much major restorations of pretty invaluable vintage instruments. They’re really top-notch.”

On the local level, Elderly Instruments has started supporting nearby Walnut Elementary School with its Musicians for Music program.

“What we’re doing is having a concert in conjunction with the Ten Pound Fiddle,” Werbin explained. “Everybody donates their time. The money collected goes to bring in a few professionals [who have] prepared programs geared toward kids. Sometimes, we’ve just sent staff over there, too, to do programs for the kids, so they’ve been getting lots of programs there from us.”

Published 12-2004

Photo by Roger Boettcher
Stan Werbin's Elderly Instruments has flourished in Lansing's Old Town.