A week or so ago there was a limited edition pedal released as a collaboration between Chase Bliss Audio and ZVex. The Bliss Factory. A mash-up of ZVex’s legendary and much-loved fuzz factory, and Chase Bliss’s robust and option-obsessed control set. With tons of cool features, brand name recognition, and awesome sounding demos, these 1000 units were snatched up faster than you could blink. Many were re-listed on Reverb by flippers looking to gouge CBA/ZVex fans who are willing to pay $750+ for a pedal, well over the asking price of $400. (btw, who on earth is willing to spend that much on any pedal?!)
This release was seen as a controversial move by some. The reactions fell into basically two camps: Those vilifying CBA head honcho Joel Korte, and those defending him. Personally, I think both of these standpoints detract from the real issue, which is price gouging on flipping rare gear (more on that below), which makes the flippers the villains, not the builders.
The Bliss Factory, along with another collaboration between Earthquaker Devices and DBA, was part of a cross-promotional effort with Reverb, which will be dropping The Pedal Movie in the near future. This brings Reverb into the mix. They’ve drawn a bit of ire as well, since the perception is that they will profit from the sales of these pedals, which were sold through Reverb. Some sellers might also still be sore about Reverb’s recent increase in seller’s fees a few months ago, from 3.5% – 5%. Overall, Reverb has the appearance of a faceless company, which makes them a little harder to empathize with. By contrast, small builders are personally out in front of their companies, providing a reminder that there are humans behind all of this gear.
I don’t find fault with any of these builders in this case, and I’ll detail my thoughts below. Gut feelings do not count as evidence, but the people running these companies seem like nice guys who are super psyched about pedals, and not shady capitalists. I’d like to take a fair and balanced look at this whole thing, partially out of curiosity, and partly because I’m a weirdo who likes to analyze small business practices. Don’t kink-shame me.
Huge disclaimer: I do not know anyone at Chase Bliss Audio, and I do not work there, and neither do you (probably). Therefore I cannot know the details of their business, and neither can you (probably). Their production schedules, costs, profit margins, distribution data, staffing decisions, covid-related challenges, financial concerns, decisions about balancing product lines, R&D, etc are not things that we consumers can understand clearly. This causes all kinds of speculation from fans and haters, which are simplistic, 2-dimensional reads on the situation. It’s a business. It’s complicated to do what they do. Consumers tend to simplify things in their head in terms of what a business should do. This is limited to our perspective as consumers, and typically misses what a business should do from their perspective, or even what they are able to do. None of us has enough details to know what is right or wrong for a company from the outside.
The argument against limited releases is pretty weak in my opinion, but it needs to be here for this part of my rant. Basically, it’s frustrating for players because they can’t get a pedal they want. They feel personally denied. The limited number of pedals available is half of the equation. The other half is the brand popularity of CBA. If you follow successful pedal brands, you’ll notice that it’s extremely common for pedals runs to sell out extremely quickly, even on non-limited-edition items. It’s a market of superfans and collectors. Once you have gained a following of a certain size, you are likely to sell out of things quickly. This seems like a problem a business would want to have, right?
Part of the controversy with CBA is that they have been in this pattern before. Let’s look at another rarity that they put out just a month and a half prior to the Bliss Factory: the Ayahuasca. This was an older pedal that was a collaboration with CBA, Abracadabra Audio and Gabriel Tanaka from Best Guitar Effects. The recent batch was limited to 100 pedals, and it sold out within 10 minutes. Faster than you could look up how to spell Ayahuasca, there were a handful up on reverb for twice the original cost, and fans on the internet bemoaning that they never had a chance to pick one up. (For the record, the Ayahuasca was a $400 pedal. Flippers’ listings on Reverb have ranged from $750-1,100).
According to the CBA website, previous to the recent offering of 100 pedals, the Ayahuasca had been produced in 10 separate runs of 10 pedals apiece, totaling 100 pedals. So the final drop actually doubled the amount of total Ayahuascas in the world. Demand appears to be higher than that, so there is room for more of these pedals, but the makers seem disinterested in continuing the line. Allegedly, Joel doesn’t regard the pedal as one of CBA’s best efforts, so naturally he is probably looking to focus the company’s efforts on projects that better represent his vision.
Coming back to the Bliss Factory… The promo material for this pedal has Joel talking about how excited he is to have made this pedal, and that it represents a vision he’s had for a while. His passion for the Bliss Factory seems real. So why would he want to create an artificial scarcity for a product that he seems super stoked about? To listen to the commenters on the internet, creating artificial scarcity benefits him as a builder, but I’m not sure how true that is.
Points to consider:
- In theory, he could charge more for initial sales on a limited run, but the BF seems to cost an average price for a CBA pedal at $400. The average range for one of their pedals is roughly $350-$500, so it doesn’t seem like he’s inflating the cost more than if this was a regular edition pedal.
- Getting fans upset at missing out on the initial run and whipping up excitement for a potential second run seems pointless. The demand clearly already exists. I doubt he would jack up the price on a second run. So what does Chase Bliss gain from teasing its fans? Attention? The dude’s sifting through hate mail every morning, so he’s got attention. I guess it works as advertising, since we’re talking about it, but it hardly seems like this is a marketing tactic. He’s also said he’s going to stop doing limited editions, so it seems like the whole process is not worth it to him.
- After the initial sale, any profits made on the second-hand market do not go back to CBA, obviously. They go to flippers.
Philosophical questions:
- Is it inherently “evil” to have a product that is “hyped”? Is the product not desirable? Is exclusivity an immoral business practice?
- Could the company’s decision to do a limited run be driven by motivations beside profit? For example: limitations in staff size, slow-downs in receiving resources, delayed package delivery, utilizing remaining PCB stock that is on-hand, etc?
- Is it better to have a low amount of a rare pedal out there in the world, or to not have that pedal at all? Is 1000 copies worse than 0 copies? Is your answer different if you have one of the copies?
For a little more context, let’s consider the most infamous cost inflation phenomenon to hit the pedal world: the Klon Centaur. It was a single product from a one-man operation in a pre-boutique-pedal world. It sounded great. Everyone wanted one. There was a wait-list that lasted months. They were expensive (relative to most pedals on the market at the time). It was kind of rare to see them on ebay (reverb didn’t exist yet), and the used prices seemed unreasonable at the time, but not compared to the ridiculous prices you see these things going for now.
There was a period before boutique builders exploded the market, and something like the Klon still seemed “mythical.’ There were no Klones yet. As prices lurched upwards, players developed some weird theories about Klon creator Bill Finnegan. There were accusations that he bought up all the remaining stock of the specific diodes he used, so that nobody else could find them. (As he tells it in an interview with Premier Guitar, he had found the diodes through a certain supplier who was planning to stop carrying the part, so he purchased the remaining supply because it would be difficult to find them elsewhere). There were also accusations that he was sitting on a secret pile of completed Centaurs to choke the supply, and then occasionally selling one at a time on ebay at highly inflated costs. This is of course the only way a builder could profit from inflated prices in the second-hand market. But it sounds like consumers were trying to come up with a conspiracy theory about why they can’t have a thing they want, using the framework that they understand (buying/selling stuff on ebay).
One would assume logically that if there was so much demand for the pedal that people were willing to pay 10x more than the original cost, then Finnegan would stand to make much more money by expanding his operation and feeding the market the old fashioned way. It’s certainly a better long-term strategy, I would think. And eventually he came out and did just that, with the more affordable KTR version of the Centaur, complete with faceplate text mocking the entire concept of people overhyping his creation.
The pedal also went on to be cloned a jillion times over. Klones are everywhere, and all of them that I have played (or otherwise heard) have sounded great. But there are still people paying thousands for originals. Why? Because of exclusivity. The material result of owning the pedal is to make the sound it makes. There are $60 clones that can replicate the tone 95% of the way. I just looked at Reverb and saw a gold Klon for $4,500. You could just get the cheap clone and spend the other $4,440 on… well, 4,440 tacos, I suppose.? A 2009 Nissan Versa XL? A human ovum?
The crucial difference here with Joel Korte and Bill Finnegan is that Bill’s creation went through a gradual process of building cred with players and establishing buzz by word of mouth. Joel’s creation doesn’t seem to have been given a chance to allow buzz to be part of the equation. And I’m positive that the Bliss Factory would get tons of positive buzz! The pedal sounds incredible in demos, and the features look fun to play with. But that’s not what people are talking about. They are talking about access to the pedal. They are pushing a narrative about conspiracy and manipulation. They are finding someone to blame because they can’t have a thing. It’s a very 2020 response.
Sometimes you don’t get a thing. Whatever.
Covid and the sabotaging of the US Postal Service have made 2020 a particularly tough year for small businesses. Chase Bliss is no exception. Since August, CBA has made some admirable customer-facing communications about transparency via their social media. Note the repeated call for understanding about fulfilling current distributor backlogs, and the attempts at increasing staff.
Chase Bliss does not have infinite resources. The calls on the internet to “just build more” are not out of line, but a company can’t just pop out a super big run of pedals right off the bat. In fact, in this follow-up instagram post, Joel highlights just how crazy it is for a company to pull off a run of 1000 pedals, like they did for the BF.
Remember that the Ayahuasca topped out at 200 units over its entire lifespan, and the Bliss Factory was five times as many in a single run. This takes a lot of time, money, and worker power to do! And that’s not even considering all of the other products that CBA is still working to fulfill in the meantime. Notice in the post above, they mention hiring 3 new full-time workers as an unprecedented increase in staff. With the popularity of CBA, it’s easy to think of them as a bigger company with dozens of employees and the ability to shore up staff at a moment’s notice, but it seems like they are smaller than one might think. Again, fans see the very end result as a sale that goes by blindingly quickly. We don’t always realize how much hard work went into making those products available.
The update goes on to say that CBA has decided to make more of the Bliss Factory in the future, which is great! This seems to answer the concerns from the many vocal customers who were not able to get a pedal. Again, I doubt the price will change, so nobody will have to feel like they got ripped off on the early sale. The early edition will retain its unique colorway, which doesn’t mean much to some people, but could mean something to the resale market if you decide to sell it down the line… you know, like an honest sale of a used pedal… not blatant scalping.
Ultimately, I can’t understand why purchasers of the first run would be upset that Chase Bliss opted to make more of these. How does it harm a purchaser to believe that a pedal is exclusive, and then hear that more will be made due to demand? It’s a pretty safe assumption that that would be a possibility. Is it that hurtful to see a company respond to the overwhelming demand for a limited product by agreeing to make more in the future? I can’t see how that is a bad thing for anyone. The people who didn’t get one will have a chance, and the people who already got one don’t lose anything. If you bought the pedal to play, then you got what you wanted, right? It would seem like the only people bummed out by the news of a second release would be the flippers because they are the only people who stand to lose anything on the deal, right?
Let’s focus on the flippers for a moment. They’re jerks. They are the ones causing the artificial raise in price, not the builder. If you are a predatory flipper, stop it. If you see flippers listing gear at ridiculous rates, don’t buy from them. They will have to sit on their inventory, and maybe after enough time they will sell it at a reasonable rate just to offload it. Don’t make flipping worth their effort. Don’t allow them to extort you.
In any event, Chase Bliss is a company and is subject to the same limitations that any other company faces. The fact that they even bothered to put out limited edition stuff is pretty cool of them, in my opinion. Looking at the social media messaging above, it seems like CBA actually went pretty far out of their way to offer special items, with all the work they seem to have on their plate already. But again, I’m just guessing here. I don’t work there, and neither do you (probably).
I do think it’s clear that the good folks at CBA, including Joel, were coming from a good place with all of this. They’ve made some really sweet pedals available early, as a perk for their email subscribers, like pretty much every other company on earth does. I support the spirit behind the whole thing. I truly believe that most of the upset comments boil down to fans not getting to have a thing that they want. I can sympathize with that feeling. I feel it every time I look at any pedal I can’t afford (which is just about every pedal, just about all the time). But it’s pretty ridiculous how bent out of shape a lot of these commenters have gotten. Sometimes you don’t get what you want. And sometimes, you don’t get what you want right away, but then you can probably get it a few months later in a different color. It’s not lost on me that the decision to produce more units was likely spurred by all the comments left online. In this case, it appears that a squeaky wheel can get greased, which is a good thing. This is evidence that CBA is listening to their audience and taking action. Just make sure that your comments in the future are constructive, and not demeaning to people running small businesses who are struggling to bring you unique and fun pedals.
And to all of you who sent hate mail… you’re ridiculous. Stop it.