How a visit to Haze Guitars works
Repair appointments here at Haze Guitars work a little differently than most other places.
The very short story is:
- Book an appointment
- Drop your instrument at your appointment time.
- Collect your instrument in a day, maybe two.
If you want, you can stop reading here.
However, for a little more information and context on the process, you might find the following useful.
Background
I pride myself on doing as good a job as possible. I’m massively proud to say that others seem to believe this to be the case. This means I’m generally pretty busy.
For someone running a business, that’s fantastic.
And it used to be a bit problematic.
Because of ‘The Pipeline’
The ‘old’ way
I used to take in instruments as players contacted me. I’d have a huge heap of guitars and basses here, working their way though the ‘pipeline’ until it was their turn. This could be two to three weeks.
I hated having to tell a player I’d have their guitar for two weeks before I got to set it up.
Not any more.
The new way (the Haze Guitars Difference)
Pre-scheduled appointments.
That’s the big difference.
Now, I ‘pre-book’ appointments and schedule the time to work on an instrument almost straight away.
Most jobs are completed in a day or two*.
“If a repairer is busy things generally go one of two ways:
(A) You can drop off your guitar and they’ll hold onto it until it works through the pipeline in a couple of weeks or more.
OR
(B) You can schedule an appointment around your gigs, continue to use your guitar until that time, at which point it’s turned around in a day or two.
As far as I’m aware, you only get option B at Haze Guitars.”
Waiting
Yes, there’s a wait before you get to see me. I consider myself very fortunate that I’m busy enough to always have a waiting period.
The BIG difference now is, you can play your guitar while you wait.
Instead of gathering dust in Haze HQ until it hits my workbench, now you can play and gig your guitar until it’s time to drop it off.
Then you get it back in a day or two*.
This is especially useful if you’re a gigging musician. You can book an appointment around your gig times. This means you don’t need to worry about borrowing guitars, rescheduling gigs, etc.
The bottom line
Pretty much everybody else does things the old way. And, if a repairer is busy, this probably means you’ll be without your guitar for a longish (and probably uncertain) period of time.
Here at Haze Guitars, you can organise your appointment around your gigs/life and have most things back in a couple of days.
And you don’t even need to talk to a human (unless you really want to). You can book online, at 3am, in your underpants if you want (just don’t tell me about it 😉)
What this all means for you
Keeping a quick turnaround means being strict with appointment scheduling. For anyone booking in, here’s what that means:
No skipping the queue
There’s no skips. If anything skips the queue, it pushes everything else out and delays everyone else in the queue. That’s not fair to a whole pipeline of players so, no skips. Of course, this also means people don’t skip ahead of you, so your guitar isn’t delayed. That’s fair, right.
But my guitar’s broken and I can’t play it
If your guitar can’t actually be played during the waiting period, you’re no worse off than you would be under the old system. It just means there’s a broken guitar at your place until I can work on it, instead of here at Haze.
I’m only going to be in your location on this one date
Sorry. In the past, I’ve tried to be as flexible as possible if someone’s travelling a longer distance but the truth is, the appointment schedule actually helps me as well as players. Any time a player drops an instrument, I lose around a half hour of working time. Scheduling appointments allows me to manage the time I work and the time I interact with players. This allows me to maximise the time I spend actually working on guitars.
I understand the issues around travelling, so this one hurts me to say but, I’m afraid that appointments are the only route.
Something’s come up and I can’t make my appointment
Let me know as soon as possible. I’ll try my best to accommodate you another time the same day. Because of how I schedule work to begin pretty much immediately your guitar arrives, though, if you can’t make it on that day, I’ll have to ask you to book a new appointment.
* The majority of jobs are turned around in a couple of days. Some work is necessarily more involved or involves its own waiting period (parts delivery, finish curing, etc.) and may take longer. Obviously.