Be careful of a "restraint of trade" action.

Also, any non-compete clause can easily be subverted by use of a third party or two.

My suggestion: Never sell your named product like that. Your top line should be available only from you. Sell the OEMs your product, but restrict the use of your product names.

Great suggestion.

Bid them up.......

Your options:

1. Buy them back
2. Suck it up.

Then in the future enforce a Min Advertised Price. Common these days.

Not to be a booger but usually manufacturers manufacture, distributors distribute, and salesmen sell. If I was a retailer of your line of products I would want you to have something of your own to sell on your own and then allow the retailers to have their own merchandise. Can you somehow keep a line for yourself and then focus on making the rest of your money off the "other" stuff by selling to more distributors?

If he won't sell to you. Maybe he'd sell to me? I'll buy them and sell em back to you for a 15% cut. Yo.

i think you will have trouble enforcing any future contracts or at least, an expensive time doing so. i would avoid selling your exclusive product in bulk unless your dealing with a lucrative contract with fender, gibson etc...

i would accept this as a learning experience and figure out a way to pay the bills till you recover and think of all those pickups as positive marketing/advertising/product reviews...which hopefully will create more interest in the product...just like they do when people buy direct from you

theres a lot that can be learned by looking at how Rickenbacker sells or refuses to sell their parts and pickups

how about just sell retail? You may not sell as much product but you make all the profit.

Work less - make the same or close to the same or perhpas more?

Wolfe, any chance I can return my pups? I know it's been a year, but I found a smokin' deal on ebay!

It's a bummer this happened with a client(former) in England. I think it would be too costly at this point to go the legal route. I would hope he takes you up on an offer to buy the remaining pups back. That sucks.

He's not a distributor. I've never had this problem before with distributors or dealers, and there are agreements between dist/dealers and I that we don't under-cut each other.



Most of my sales are direct to the consumer, and about 15%-20% go to luthiers building guitars for clients. Moose Guitars was one such luthier.





Funny you said that. I'd rather eat my own testicles than deal with Henry at Gibson. Or John at Rickenbacher.
I may be producing about 40 P-90's soon for a line of guitars from G&L, destined for one of my local dealers

I think you should take the suggestion that your consumer line is branded as WolfeTone Pickups and anything you sell to a builder should be branded and packaged under a different name.

No you didn't understand what I was saying. Either you manufacture, you distribute or you sell. If you are going to manufacture and retail your own product then it can't be the same that you have others selling. The problem here is that you two have the same stuff. A couple small changes and a sticker will remedy most of this heartache.

i was not saying you should deal with either....why would john at rickenbacker deal with you anyway? they make their own pickups.

what i was saying is that unless i was selling very large batches to a major manufacturer on such a scale that i could support the business with that contract alone, i wouldnt sell in batches at all for the exact reason why you posted.

as for rickenbacker, the lesson to be learned is how they do not distribute their parts or pickups...you cant even get a truss rod cover unless you buy it from THEM...they are the exclusive dealer for their products and are able to protect their image, intellectual property and profit by doing so

as for G&L, i would say that is a big step up from Moose guitars or whoever the heck you sold a batch to. to be blunt, why would you even take a risk having your pickups associated with a company that may in the end, build a lousy product or be a here-today-gone-tomorrow company? for a quick buck? Or did you think Moose guitars was going to be the next PRS? Sure, your pickups already have a very fine reputation and probably the worst case scenario would be, yea i bought a Moose guitar and it sucked and they are out of business but the pickups were awsome...but why take that risk.....If Doug Irwin or Paul Languedoc asks you sell them a batch, thats a different story and worth the risk simply based on the name association

Most of the independent builders - short of Dimarzio and Seymour Duncan - both manufacture and sell, while also retaining brick and mortar stores and OEM customers who use thier product on guitars.
Most independent guitar builder also sell thier product, whiel also having some retailers as well.
Same goes for independent amplfier and pedal companies, and hardware manufacturers like Pigtail, Callaham, etc.

That's the way it works. Having my product on a top-of-the-line custom instruments is not only a selling point for the instrument itself, but a selling point for my own product. I made pickups for some of the top builders in the world.. people like Heatley Guitars
- Giffin Guitars - D'Pergo - Kortmann Guitars - Gene Baker (The Keebler Elf) and quite a few others.
Having my product on those guitars, if they are not identified as my product, becomes detrimental to the spreading of my own name as people no longer identify my product as being on high end guitars.

It's a symboitic relationship.

Fernandes Guitars in Japan handled all of my Asian distribution for several years, as well as having my stuff on thier top of the line guitars. They were fired as a customer in 2010 after trying to pull a fast one on me.

Having dealers also helps to aleviate some of my own headaches, as instead of dealing with 100 or more people a month, I may only have to deal with 75 if they can get them from a dealer. It gets to be quite exhausting sometimes.


Nevertheless, the saga continues. He's put more srtuff on ebay again, after saying that he wouldn't. He's still undermining and devaluing our name.

Is there a certified stamp or label on your (high-end) primary product?
That adheres your name to the big brands.

Every one of my products has a lable that bears our logo, brand name, and which model it is.
If it is somethign specifically designs for a particular luthier, it will bear our logo, brand name, and "Luthier-name Custom" as it's model designation.
Said Luthier requested our bread-and-butter models, so nothing was designed specifically for him.