Chuck Surack, CEO of Sweetwater, and Music Tribe’s CEO, Uli Behringer, today announced the entering of an industry-first strategic relationship. The focus of this super partner relationship is to deliver an obsessive customer experience with unique collaborative opportunities to realize co-innovation of new products, co-marketing related to learning and education, and a unique EDI collaboration to ensure all products are always in stock and available.
“This unique opportunity as a super partner with Music Tribe fits neatly into our vision and enhances our ability to serve our customers’ needs. With this factory direct relationship, we expect that in the near future our customers will experience a noticeable increase in availability of Music Tribe products. In addition to carrying over 1,000 Music Tribe products, we are delighted to provide best-in-class technical support and service for our customers. It’s a win-win for everyone,” said Sweetwater Surack.
“With Starin’s departure from the pro audio distribution late last year, Music Tribe had to reinvent its go-to-market strategy and it became obvious that the best customer experience would be best generated by completely separating the retail (Prosumer) from the enterprise (Professional) business,” said Behringer. “With this new setup, all our retail products will now go through e-commerce channels, while we’re in the process of setting up dedicated distributors for the install as well as live and tour sound enterprise market who will continue to serve all our valued integrators and contractors.”
“We are extremely honored and thrilled to enter this truly purposeful relationship with Sweetwater, who will serve our retail customers with Music Tribes’ entire offering of brands,” Behringer added. “For decades, Sweetwater has been leading the industry through unsurpassed customer experience, which matches Music Tribes’ customer obsession vision. This strategic relationship will now open the door for a deep integration and collaboration – all for the benefit of the customer.
The partnership will improve product availability, product marketing, and customer service, Behringer says.
“Music Tribe is one of the very few companies in the industry that manufactures nearly all its products in-house,” Behringer explains. “This allows us to ship all our products from our China and Malaysia factories directly to Sweetwater’s warehouses, saving huge time and cost resources. Our customers will now enjoy much faster access to new products, while also a cost reduction of up to 40 percent, in line with our philosophy to pass on savings to our customers.”
He adds: “Both Sweetwater and Music Tribe will collaborate in the creation of digital learning and education content in order to help customers to maximize the usage of Music Tribe’s products. In the coming year, we will be launching our Music Tribe Academy, an interactive learning management system, where our customers and partners can co-create courses and other content. With the setup of this new strategic relationship, Sweetwater will now directly be supporting and servicing all Music Tribe products through its own call center and in-house service facility. Music Tribe will serve Sweetwater with global support services as well as spare parts supply directly from our factories, hence improving the product turnaround time. Music Tribe’s retail products do enjoy an industry-leading 3-year warranty upon registration at Music Tribe’s Community.”
“We are truly excited about this wonderful relationship with Sweetwater, while now taking it to a complete new level,” added Music Tribe’s COO (Customer Operations Obsessor) David Hunter. “We’re currently reinventing our whole organization by means of extreme digital transformation and automation of all repetitive processes. Our objective is to become a highly strategic and insight driven organization, and we’re currently investing over US $50m in fully automating our current China operation. This year we acquired 50 acres of land in Malaysia where we’re planning our second manufacturing plant. We’re very proud to have entered into strategic relationships with Microsoft and Siemens around a state-of-the-art 4.0 factory in line with our relentless execution on our Customer and Digital Obsession Vision.”
