Welcome to Guitar goose! In this first post here I would like to introduce my personal favorite brand of not only cheap guitars, but cheap musical equipment in general! Expect much more content in the near future, until then, thanks for tuning in ;).
Who is Harley Benton and why haven’t I ever heard of them?
This is a question I get asked quite frequently, and its no surprise, as you’ll never see a Harley Benton guitar in any music store around the world. You see, Harley Benton is the in-house brand of Musikhaus Thomann, Europe’s largest retailer of almost everything music. Their guitars are made in China and quality controlled in Germany. Thomann sells Harley Benton products exclusively online, and spends next to nothing on marketing, and therefore they’re still quite under the radar.
Why are Harley Benton guitars so cheap?
While cheap is a word we can use to describe their price ranges, the same cannot be said about the quality of their products. Unlike most of the big names in the guitar industry, Harley Benton’s marketing strategies – or lack thereof – contribute to their ridiculously low prices. The usual guitar marketing strategy goes something like this: X brand makes a guitar and want to sell it to you, but in order for you to know it exists, they need to spend money on advertising its existence, next they need to sell it to a middleman (e.g. a music store) that will sell it to you. This means that when you purchase anything at your local music store you are paying:
- The brand’s profit
- The middleman’s profit
- Marketing
What Thomann has done with Harley Benton is to avoid most of these expenses through lack of advertising and cutting out the middleman, and so they go from manufacturing their product straight to selling it to you, and you only pay:
- The brand’s profit
Marketing logistics aside, having the production in china means labor is a lot cheaper than having the guitars be made in South Korea, Indonesia, Mexico, Europe or the USA, but as a result the quality can suffer, though most of the time the flaws being only minor visual imperfections.
Pros & Cons
After having read this far about avoiding the middlemen, I’m sure one of two things is going through your head and that is either “That sounds amazing!” orrr “Sounds too good to be true…” and as is the case with most things in life, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Pros
- Most of the cost of the instrument has gone towards manufacturing as good a product as that money can make, allowing Harley Benton to offer a superior product with a drastically lower price tag than the competition.
- The same money you would’ve spent on a sub-par guitar at your local music store now buys you a superior guitar, with better components at almost every step of the manufacturing process.
Cons
- You cannot try the instrument before buying it.
Conclusion
Harley Benton is a brand whose vision is to build the best quality guitars for as little money as possible, with over 1000 musical products on offer as of the writing of this post, and an ever-growing fan base of half-broke individuals like myself that are looking to get the most bang for their buck, to find the best cheap guitars online!
Guitar Goose 