Accordion shop squeezes out more success online

The Web site generates more than half of the store’s business.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

As kids, Bruce Pastorius and Ken Mahler made an odd pair: Mahler, the quiet kid who dutifully practiced his accordion 45 minutes every day as his excitable friend from parochial school impatiently waited to go play in the streets of St. Paul, Minn.

But the sound of that accordion kept a link between them as they went to different high schools and pursued disparate career paths. Now, it has turned the lifelong friends into co-workers.

Mahler Music Center, a 25-year-old bandbox of an accordion shop in St. Paul, is enjoying new life as one of the nation’s pre-eminent online accordion dealers, thanks to a makeover Pastorius gave his buddy’s business. The store’s companion site, AccordionHeaven.com, turns 50,000 hits a month and that’s helped push Mahler Music’s yearly revenues to $250,000 and give the business a second market.

Mahler has also kept the store going thanks to his fanatical collecting of old accordion parts for future repairs and the success of his self-designed, Italian-manufactured accordion line.

“There was a point I was ready to give up,” Mahler said. “[Going to] the Internet was one of the smartest moves I made.”

There’s nothing about the store that would suggest it’s the brick-and-mortar home of a thriving online business.

There is no place for the 51-year-old Mahler to sit, except at his workbench in the back of the store, where he uses wooden blocks to tune accordion reeds and matches a stockpile of obscure parts with instrument brands he is seeing for the first time.

It looks like the kind of neighborhood music shop vanishing from cities across the country.

And had Mahler not brought his old friend on board to help modernize the business plan, his store may have joined that club.

Pastorius, also 51, had built a career in sales and marketing in the software industry. He moved back to Minnesota from California in 2002, having done some consulting to help “storefronts get out of the Dark Ages” with regard to the Internet.

Mahler estimates the Web site now generates 50 percent to 65 percent of the store’s business, and it has put him in a position to run the business for another 20 years.