Back in 2019 I had the opportunity along with my dad to visit the wonderful guys at TMA (The Musical Alliance) in The Netherlands. TMA are the distribution company for Mayson, Salvador Cortez, Boston, and plenty of other brands. They are one of the largest distributers in Europe for the MI Industry.
We relish the opportunity to visit our partners within the industry, we like to be able to absorb the companies ethos and be able to translate that efficiently to our customers.
We arrived in the late morning to be greeted at the front door with a super smiley, super friendly Ron. We had let Ron know we were coming and he was ready with the coffee’s, man after our own hearts ;)
We we’re presented with a showroom packed lovingly with Mayson, Salvador Cortez & Acus amps. The best the brands had to offer and they best selling models.
Maysons Duchess model was one that really shone, presented in these amazing wooden display cases.
After our coffee's, palying some lovely guitars and seeing some new models not yet released, it was straight to business...
First the delivery depot where the trucks offload onto conveyors, the items roll down these into the warehouse where items are stored using a barcoding system to match the item with the correct shelf. No product ever gets lost, no shelf gets dusty!
We we're then taken through multiple of these warehouse facilties, i cannot justify in words how big this place actually is! Just take my word for it... it's massive!
Then onto the packing room where they have loads of specialist and custom made machinery to package their products. This resonated with us because we have spent many a sleepless night packaging pot knobs, screws, etc etc in little bags with our WM branding on. They were doing the same just on a massive scale!
After the packing room we we're presented with a oppertunity to get nosey in their workshop and oh boyyy.... do we love a good workshop! The workshop was really well organised with racks of guitars, ukes, basses, cellos, double basses, etc all racked up seperatly with production stickers on them. You could tell that every single instrument gets a quality control check here before shipping. This gives you 3 differant points of quality control check at a minimum along the distribution process.
This gave us great security in their products and we ended up chatting with their techs for quite a while.
We even found a cheeky rack of lovely spalted and other figured billets. Apparently they had been there a while... still regret not making an offer on the lot!
Finally ending the say with Salvador Cortez and they're range of stunning classical guitars. These guitars blew us away, they are impecably made with tradition at the core of their ethos. Super light weight and powerful. You can kind of tell i spent of lot of time drooling on their carpet here.
A little bit of lunch with Ron later and we we're done for the day! A load of new knowledge and gained an insight into some of our main brands and how they are made and the people who sell them.
All in all The Musical Alliance maybe quite a big company but we we're treated as if we walked into your small family run corner shop. Super friendly and welcoming team, a great atmosphere to work in, beautiful products they can be proud of. They ticked all the boxes for us and that's why we are the largest stockist of Mayson Guitars in the UK and potentially Salvador Cortez but i can't say for sure.
Be sure to check out these incredible brands on our website and if your local, pop in and give them a go!
Thank you all for reading 🤟
Written by:
Ryan Havinga
