Pomona HQ Tour

[Pura Vida]

Last week, I was traveling through SoCal on a college tour for my daughter.  I was fortunate to visit the Eastman HQ in Pomona, where Mark Herring showed me around their warehouse and offices.

The first thing I noticed is that Eastman is doing great things with relatively few people. When I visited, there were probably less than a dozen people in the setup / office areas, plus about the same working in each of the two warehouses (one for guitars, one for strings).

There were two guys in the luthier shop: Otto and another guy, who was on his way to the Bourgeois facility in Maine for an indefinitely amount of time. They are really creating a symbiotic relationship between China, Pomona, and Maine, where all three facilities are learning from each other. Mark explained to me how they've been successful with similar acquisitions in their orchestral instrument lines (e.g. Haynes flutes). Eastman gains in process knowledge, while Bourgeois gains in distribution, especially into the Asia market, and both gain with wood and material sourcing (Eastman's founder loves to buy quality wood).

I didn't take any photos in this area b/c there were a couple of unannounced guitars in the room, and I didn't want to risk anything leaking ahead of NAMM. After 18 years working at Apple, I've learned to respect company confidentiality and found myself consciously trying not to look any any of the new guitars.

There were two guys working in the setup shop. These guys perform the final inspections and setups on all of the acoustic and electric guitars that get sold in North and South America. There's been a lot of discussion about volume, and they confirmed they're inspecting 40-50 guitars per day and shipping close to 25k guitars annually (not sure if that's worldwide or Americas). That's an increase from the 4-6k they were doing back in 2017, but a fraction of what the big guitar companies are doing.

The upstairs area contains a typical office layout with cubicles for marketing and sales, a studio area for photos and sound, and a break area to play some guitar or just chill out. It's functional and efficient, which seems consistent with so much at Eastman. There were two people from Marketing, two more in the studio, and another person in the break area. Steve (sales) and Dan (customer service) were both out of the office, so I didn't get to meet them, and the Americas president was also out. It's remarkable that so few people are driving so much work, answering our questions, spending time online, trade shows, working with dealers, etc.

I didn't get to tour the strings offices (just the warehouse / setup area), but it probably had a similar layout. The strings warehouse seemed slightly larger, since the instruments are bigger. I took a few photos from this side, which I can add later on.

Here are some photos from my tour. Thanks to Mark and the gang at Eastman for giving me a peak inside of their world, so I could share it here.

Eastman HQ: Pomona, CA


Setup Room:




Eastman Guitar Alien:


Setup Techs:




Warehouse:

[AlanSam]

Interesting day Brian - thanks for the report and pics!

[Meathead]

Awesome!  Cheers to Mark and the rest of the Eastman team for allowing you to take the tour - and thank you for posting this for the rest of us to read about and enjoy the photos.  Interesting information regarding their annual volumes, BTW.  Thanks again for sharing.

[sleigh]

Brian -- thanks for the glimpses into Pomona! Fascinating!

[cjhorne]

Inspecting 40-50 guitars a day works out to 5 per hour, not counting time for breaks.  So maybe 10 minutes per inspection.  Wow!  That sounds like a grind.  And that explains why they are not trying to hit the 3/32" / 2/32" string height setup specs listed on Eastman's web page.

To achieve 2,500/year, each of the two inspection techs would have to inspect 40-50 guitars per day for a total of 80 - 100/day.  Presumably the 2,500 number is US only.

In the 3rd photo, the 7 guitars on the left dolly sure look like my PCH1-D.

Thanks for posting.  Very interesting.  I always wondered what was going on at the Pomona operation.

CJ