New year, new directions
As I discussed in my most recent email newsletter, it is time for me to phase out selling Eurorack modules as my main business. In 2025 I sold roughly the number of modules per month that I would need to sell per day to be able to make a living. I'm surviving on other, more profitable, parts of my business, and using those to subsidize Eurorack module manufacturing as what comes down to an expensive hobby that I can't afford. Even if something like a new product or a new ad campaign could give me a little bump on Eurorack sales, it's clear that the structural issues aren't going to change, and I can't realistically have Eurorack modules be my main business anymore.
That's not to say any of my existing products will be immediately discontinued. I still have stock of most of them, and parts for more, and my plan is to keep selling products as long as I have products to sell. I may even be in a position to do additional manufacturing runs, especially if there are dealers who want to place reasonable-sized wholesale orders. I am not yet in a position of needing to take down names for waiting lists on future manufacturing runs, but it's not impossible I could do that if it becomes appropriate.
However, you shouldn't expect that items which go out of stock in this online storefront will necessarily be stocked again soon, or possibly at all.
I think the biggest underlying problem here is the general decline in the world economy, and especially in international trade, post-COVID. The "tariff" situation between Canada and the USA certainly hasn't helped much, but I want to emphasize that that's not the only thing going on, the biggest problems predated that, and most of my products are tariff-exempt anyway. It's just not as simple as all being the fault of the Trump Administration's anti-globalization policies.
The steady ratcheting up of European restrictions and regulations has been as big a blow as the loss of US sales. I get very few orders from European customers now - because they are reasonably afraid of having to pay extra charges on import - and the cost of fulfilling European orders and playing by all of the rules, keeps going up. Combined with the collapse of wholesale (dealer) sales, it's a deadly combination.
I haven't increased the prices of my own products, because I don't think I can afford to lose any more unit sales. But the prices of all my inputs have gone up, and will not go down in the future, and that means the remaining profit per unit is now considerably lower than it was at the time I originally set the prices on my existing products. And if I create new products, I will have to price them in a higher range.
As I look for new directions to take my business, I know one thing customers really appreciate is the electronics-themed educational material I provide. That includes this Web log, and the manuals to my synth-module products. I'm hoping to be able to do more of that kind of thing. Over on my video-subscription site, Matthew Explains, I've posted a call for comment on the idea of electronics-themed video lectures. If you'd be interested in those, I hope you'll go over there, create an account, and post a comment with your thoughts. Comments on this entry here are disabled, to encourage discussion on that entry instead.
You may already know, but I'd like to remind you, that I'm available for consulting on electronics and especially synth electronics topics, as well as some other subject areas. If you're building synthesizers and want some help, I hope you'll contact me and we can talk about what you're doing. I can't publish a fixed rate card because every project is different, but there's no charge or obligation for talking about your project in general terms, and all the more so if you're in a non-profit hobby situation. I generally like getting basic technical questions and don't mind answering them in an informal context. If you want me to be involved in a commercial project in a more serious way, then we can talk about that as well. One typical service I provide for other small manufacturers is reviewing a design, going through and giving comments on things that will or won't work well. That usually comes to a few hundred dollars' worth of work; and in 2025 it seemed to be a better business for me to be in, than outright sales of my own synth module products.
I will be making some significant behind-the-scenes technical changes to my Web sites in the next few months. That's not directly because of the change in business direction, but it has come up at the same time. After encountering some serious issues during a server migration a few months ago, and that leading into discovering some non-technical problems, it has become clear to me that I don't want to remain on my current cloud hosting platform. I've been there at least since 2012, possibly earlier (longer than North Coast Synthesis Ltd. has existed, anyway) and it's time for an update. My hope is that nearly everything I change will be invisible to Web site visitors, but one thing likely to happen is the removal of the "Audio" and "Video" links from the headers on this site, with the content from those (to the extent it's still relevant) moving onto the main virtual host.
