“Just as an experiment, I took some of the material we’d been using on this engineering project,” says Rovner. “I fashioned a ligature out of it that looks very similar to the Dark model that we currently make. Lo and behold, it enabled me to improve my performance on the horn.”
He went on to make a few more ligatures for players he knew in the local scene as well as send a few out to top players around the U.S. The reaction was great, and when Rovner began getting orders from dealers, and he soon realized he had a hit on his hands.
Today, the Maryland-based Rovner Products is known as the international leader in ligatures and has long since explored a variety of other products with significant success, including mouthpieces, maintenance products, and a brand new take on the clarinet barrel. They employ 14 staff members and have sold millions of ligatures worldwide.
Rovner recently passed the torch to George and Lynn Reeder (now president and vice president, respectively), selling the company to them in January while remaining onboard to devote himself to R&D. As George Reeder notes, the company maintains an important place in the market. “These Rovner ligatures are made 100 percent in the U.S.,” he says. “All of our vendors are U.S. vendors, so we have a ripple effect on helping out the U.S. economy.”
The company has plans for expansion in the near future.
SELLING THEMSELVES
In the beginning, even after the ligatures began production, they weren’t Rovner’s primary focus. In the early days, he was putting the majority of his effort into a speaker company he’d started called Power Research Products, thinking he’d try his hand at the booming hi-fi market. Though his speakers were acclaimed in trade publications, Rovner didn’t enjoy the sales dynamic of that world.
“In hi-fi, a lot of people are just attuned to whatever they grew up with – boom boxes, radios, whatever,” he says. “It’s hard for them to be perceptive enough to recognize true authentic sound. So everything ends up being sold purely on good salesmanship.”
His ligatures, on the other hand, sold themselves. From his first marketing step (a tiny ad in the classified section of International Musician that read “Freedom for Your Reed”), the allure of a newly designed ligature piqued the industry’s interest. As business picked up, Rovner was happy to move into MI full time.
NEW DIRECTIONS
Now the company is embarking on its next adventure, hoping to find new opportunities for Phil Rovner’s ongoing innovations. The Reeders joined the company in 2009, when Rovner hired them as consultants for new products and marketing. George had been a fan of the ligatures since the ‘80s and became friends with Rovner at a jazz jam he had launched in Westminster, Md.
As new owners, the Reeders are looking for growth in a few directions, including a renewal of market education about useful products like Rovner’s Boost Juice Sax & Pad Performance Enhancement Kit, the new Rectangular Bore clarinet barrels, and of course plenty of developing inventions from Rovner himself.
Reeder says after initially launching the clarinet barrel last year with the pro market in mind, they quickly reconfigured their approach when it seemed that the pros already had plenty of barrel options. “We looked at what market wasn’t really getting the benefit of this barrel, and it was right there in front of us: the bread and butter of our ligature market, the school band.” The company re-engineered to build a barrel with pro-level features at an affordable price point. Reeder thinks of the barrel, which can be turned to adjust for intonation, as “training wheels for beginners.”
He also sees a use for pro sax players who are called on to double in performances on a clarinet (or, as some saxophonists may know it, the “agony stick”).
Expect Rovner to be churning out a handful of new products (especially mouthpieces, he says) in the very near future, all with that philosophy of affordable innovation in mind.
“We could make a really great mouthpiece right now that would be a $1,000 mouthpiece, but we don’t like that,” says George. “We don’t want to make an exclusive product. We want to make a product that many people can benefit from.
“That’s where it takes a lot of creativity – to take those great ideas and incorporate them into something from which a lot of people can benefit.”
