![]() Pricing in line with a solid product line, but in no way compelling. As others have mentioned here, I have often wondered how they could stay afloat with a solid line of products that generated no particular enthusiasm and making them in southern California when all competition is in asia. Recently I have come to respect Carvin quite a bit, and I have a heavy duty 2x10 bass cab and 500 watt class D bass amp. I think that was due to ignorance and an obsession to only buy what we saw on stage with our rock heros. Something you got until you could afford your marshall or whatever. When I was a teenager in the 70s, we were pretty down on Carvin as a brand. Their guitar line does cover a lot of niches that the major companies do not address very well and workmanship is good. The necessity of getting skilled industry specific labor to make guitars was much higher than with the PA products.Ĭarvin's PA products were reasonably good, but nothing really special. Carson and Gavin) the guitar operation made more sense in California than did speaker cabinets, mixing boards and amplifiers. ![]() When Carvin split the guitar operation off as Kiesel (the name of the founder of the company, Lowell Kiesel, who named the company "Carvin" after his sons, Carson and Gavin for years, I thought they were Carmine and Vincent, but no. So if you are building semiconductor process equipment, precision scientific optics, et al, California may make sense even though it is expensive and inconvenient. It wold take ten years to build a functionally skilled workforce in a "business friendly" area and 25 to get that caliber of skills overall. ![]() They don't like certain things about the area, to be sure, but it's home. They like it where they are and do not want to move. So, when the company flew their engineer out for lunch with us, all of us who are fans of that company's products generally asked him one question: Why don't you guys relocate? His answer was that as one of less than half a dozen facilities worldwide with their capabilities in investment casting, they have a skilled labor base that consists of people who have worked there since the seventies and whose parents worked there since the fifties. Using their product has saved us several hours plus per unit of manufacturing time and reduced our cost of build substantially while being actually more durable than the previous piece. As it turned out their casting process is so good that the piece they make needs only trivial additional work before being used in the final assembly. Their most famous product line, a category of goods not allowed to be discussed here, is a product for which the business climate in that state is exceptionally poor aside from CT having the same basic conventional business climate issues as California has. We were approached by a famous company in Connecticut that are masters of investment casting with the idea that they could do it cheaper as a near net shape investment casting. It was originally made up of several machined pieces that were (originally oxy-acy, then heliarc) welded, annealed, shot peened, cleaned, machined further, hardened and tempered. ![]() "Business climate" refers to tax and regulatory environments, labor laws, and real estate and energy costs.Īs an example, my employer makes a product that is used be telecom outside plant installers and techs. But for what is essentially a commodity product like Carvin's PA and sound reinforcement line, and their guitar amps, California is the wrong place. It depends on what you are trying to do.Īs far as manufacturing, if you are making a high end high per additional unit profit product that benefit from or requires Caltech or Stanford level engineering talent or highly skilled manufacturing workers that happen to be available in California, it can work out well.
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