HTFR - A Brief History

Started back in 1991, HTFR's founder Jason Kirby sold the latest dance vinyl from his bedroom. Life was simpler back then with a lot less in the way of genres and a pre-digital market hungry for any and every piece of wax that was coming out of the exploding dance music scene. Within a couple of years, HTFR was operating from proper premises to service the vinyl hungry DJs and went online all the way back in 1995. Growth has been rapid and now HTFR is one of the biggest vinyl and DJ equipment stores around, and is also unique in having both retail and online stores for both.

The Store

Stepping off the train at Birmingham New Street Station and making the 5 minute walk up the too steep for words Gough Street, the true vastness of the HTFR operation is hidden behind a Tardis-like retail exterior. Walking into the recently refitted showroom, you're met with the double treat of racks of wax (yes it still exists) and a serious amount of DJ tackle.

You also welcomed by the warm and friendly face of Moses - meeter and greeter of considerable size (check the picture below), and feeler of your collar should you step out of line. And if you think you're coming in with a rucksack to empty the shelves, think again. Lockers are provided to leave your shoplifting gear in. If you don't like it, please feel free to steal your DJ gear and vinyl elsewhere thanks.



As I mentioned before, the store has had a refit, making it way more accessible and open, but importantly making people more aware that HTFR actually sells DJ gear as well. For some people, it wasn't obvious despite the cabinets of gear on display, so more has been moved downstairs with the more mobile oriented selection being laid out in the upstairs showroom.

In the downstairs showroom however, the gear tends to be in glass cabinets, but should you want to have a play, all you have to do is ask nicely and one of the many staff will happily get the gear out for you to at least touch, and if you need it they'll power it up for a proper play. You understand that not every lump of gear they sell can be out on display and most certainly not plugged in, but this is the eventual aim.

Being pretty centrally located in the UK, and just a 5 minute walk from the main train station, HTFR is an ideal place to check out that lump of gear you've hocked your Grandpa's war medals for. A quick phone call to the store will ensure it's available for you to play with.



HTFR cater for most spheres of DJs - beginners, mobile, club scratch etc etc, but you won't find any laptops on display or hugely expensive AV gear ready to play with. But for the average DJ looking to buy anything from myfirstdjgear to bells and whistles laden extreme DJ setups, HTFR can supply that, and more often than not will be able to let you try before you buy. Especially handy considering the amount of money you can spend online having never even touched it.



Like any good retail outfit, there's a high level of staff on the floor ready to help. Thankfully they leave you alone until you ask for help but were friendly once you'd engaged them. I'm sure some people would take this as ignoring the customer and I'm equally sure those same people would consider being asked if they were OK as high pressure sales tactics as well. I'm a firm believer in asking for help if you need it so for me, HTFR have got it right. Would you rather they hovered around asking if they can help every 2 minutes? Didn't think so.

Behind the Scenes

Here's the thing though - despite a large retail outlet, 80% of HTFR's business is online. So they certainly need a slick setup to support this level of business.



Starting with the front end - sales. The most logical first port of call is www.htfr.com. This is a massive website with something crazy like 4000 different products available to blow your hard earned cash - or student loan on. It's a little busy and takes some working through to find everything there but works very well. In fact there's so much detail on there that it's become quite a resource for me when I need some particular knowledge such as which fader fits a mixer.



Ordering works just like any other website and is totally secure. I saw the system driving the back end and even the sales staff don't get to see your credit card numbers. But you can order via phone, email, fax - even SMS. My preference is the phone as I like to make retailers squeal with pain when I beat them down on price. And here's a little secret - HTFR have an eBay store (with a 99% rating) as well where some serious bargains can be had if you happen to visit at the right time. Payment is easy too - cash over the counter, cheque, credit card and for the more internet savvy even PayPal. Finance can also be arranged as well.



Speaking as someone who has written databases, works on the web and spent the best part of 2 decades in the design/repro/IT trade, The HTFR brochure is a work of art. It links very neatly to the database and is almost entirely automatically generated. 300,000 of these make it out in the market every few months and when they hit the doormats of subscribers, the HTFR sales team don't get much rest. Code 1 for them on a regular basis (they know what I mean). And despite its size, it only covers around 30% of their entire range. So for those of you familiar with it, you'll begin to appreciate range that HTFR offers.

Records - and lots of them

Walking into the vinyl buying department is quite an experience. You're greeted by a massive wall of used vinyl plus boxes of fresh wax plus several dedicated experts - all armed with a Stanton deck - who beaver away through new stock to scan covers, labels, make MP3s and write short reviews for every new release and used vinyl that comes through the door. All vinyl is checked and labeled up by hand ensuring that warped vinyl doesn't even make it to retail. Note - vinyl isn't shrink wrapped. HTFR are more than aware that shrink wrapping has been a major source of warping problems in the past.

Each of these vinyl junkies is a specialist in the frankly crazy numbers of genres and sub genres of today's dance music scene. It seems that what these guys don't know about dance music isn't worth knowing. The website is probably a better source of info for what's currently hot than the magazines as you can listen to the tracks as they come in. As a guide, HTFR have stocked around 6500 new 12" titles alone in 2007 and sell on average around 50 copies of each new release in a matter of days, the best seller hitting 500 copies. That's some serious numbers right there.

HTFR was founded in selling vinyl and will remain as a very important part of the HTFR business. There has been a steady market decline in vinyl sales over the last 10 years but HTFR are slowly grabbing a large slice of the remaining market and improving their market share. It's not just new vinyl, but old classics as well that make up the HTFR vinyl offer. I guess old habits die hard. I genuinely think that if things turned bad in the hardware market that Jason Kirby would be just as happy selling vinyl from his bedroom again.

The picture above shows just one isle in the vinyl warehouse. If memory serves, there are something like six more isles just like this, plus a smaller room with a serious stash of new and used vinyl with an estimated 200,000 different titles. And let's not forget the shop stock as well. It's as if all the vinyl in the world is being stored in this one shop.

Stock - how much??

Let me give you a few numbers:

• HTFR send out on average 1000 packages per day. Yes, PER DAY.
• Christmas week sees that number leap to 2000 dispatches per day.
• The split is around 60/40 in favour of vinyl
• 85% is UK, 15% overseas
• As a guide, HTFR sell 50 CDJ1000s per month

So you can see that HTFR isn't "just a record shop in Brum" but is in fact a seriously large organisation and growing all the time. Walking into the retail shop is pretty awesome but having a look around the store rooms is a real eye opener - and frankly a heart stopper. I was like a kid in a sweet shop, wondering up and down the endless isles of vinyl and DJ gear. I have honestly never seen so much DJ stuff in one place. But when you look at the level of daily sales, you can begin to appreciate the amount of stock needed. 50 CDJs in a month for Christs sake - that's just silly numbers.



Scattered around the various HTFR offices are screens just like the one above. They give everyone in the company a very visual and current state of play with regards to getting your orders out the door. Some of the numbers want to be high, others they'd prefer to be zero. But this does underline that they're committed to keeping on top of your order and getting it to you on time.

Getting the orders out the door is no mean feat, especially when handling such huge volumes of product per day. But every care seems to be taken to make sure that the right product is shipped. Once the order has been received and confirmed, it then gets passed to despatch who pick the orders from stock. At this point, the order becomes a paper trail and hopefully the staff are vigilant enough to check for example that the right remix of a 12" is being sent instead of the totally last year mashup. Indeed there's even an "incorrectly picked" pile - which was empty when I was there.

Everything seems to be properly wrapped but once out of the door, it's hard for HTFR to ensure that the people delivering your order share the same wish that the product get there in one piece, if arrive at all. And of course, late or non-delivery and damaged product hits hard on the rep of the retailer, despite being out of their hands - so HTFR have put measures in place to make sure that the customer doesn't lose out. Firstly, everything is sent out insured so should your order get lost or damaged then you're covered. And there's also a dedicated member of staff who deals with incidents such as this, to make sure that any despatch issues are sorted out quickly.

Price - how much??!?

I've read much on the net about HTFR's high prices, and looking at the website they do seem to be slightly higher than their competitors. On certain brands they're often cheaper due to striking great deals and with others they tend to be the same. We're only talking about a few quid on the whole but sometimes there are exceptions

But nobody in their right mind pays the advertised price right? Surely you take the time to phone around, playing each retailer off against each other until only one remains? Oh you don't... well you should. And to help with this, HTFR offer a price promise - if you can prove that another retailer has been mercilessly beaten into submission price-wise, they'll try to at least match it, if not beat it. But this only applies to hardware.

As far as vinyl pricing goes, HTFR stay pretty solid in that respect. They seem to charge the new standard £5-6 for a 12" with a sliding scale for older and rare vinyl. But if it's proving Hard To Find (groan...), the rules of supply and demand kicks in.

Still think you paid too much for a product? Well now you can do your best to get them to a price you're happy to pay. But at the end of the day, nobody is forcing you to buy from them.

About The Bad Rep

Unless you live in a cave, you can't fail to have heard at least something bad about HTFR so it would be pretty stupid of me to try and skim over the seemingly poor reputation so I'm going to try to put it into some sort of context.

The bulk of this smack talk seems to focus on vinyl - being overpriced, sending out damaged or warped vinyl or sending the wrong 12". And from a customer service point of view it seems that some staffers may not have exactly given off a warm and fuzzy vibe down the phone, especially when trying to sort out problems.

And the ever growing online DJ community became the perfect weapon for less than happy punters to fire off salvos of HTFR hate to anyone who would listen. And of course with the internet, shit sticks on a global scale.

What's being done to fix things?

As with any business, it's about evolution but especially in the last 18 months, huge steps have been taken to ensure that this rep becomes a memory. Sure - not every one of the 1000+ daily orders will go exactly to plan, but when things go wrong, HTFR seem to go out of their way to make sure things are fixed ASAP. And with such a volume of orders, a small percentage of things going wrong translates to more people who can throw a hissy fit on the net. To put things in context: if HTFR ship 1000 orders per day and only 0.5% of that has an issue, that's still 5 unhappy people per day who can get vocal on the net and that's all you hear. The remaining 995 people remain silent and happily continue to order with confidence.

Being the size that HTFR has become, a dedicated after-sales team is in place to make sure that should you have a complaint, it'll be dealt with in a professional manner and brought to a swift conclusion. The customer is the number one priority for the staff, but it works both ways. Politeness will get you a better response than throwing a tantrum down the phone.

My advice - read up on exactly what your rights are before bellowing death threats at retailers because your Technics key ring is a day late, and read the HTFR terms and conditions before ordering. A working knowledge of retail law might well be a good idea when trying to return a mixer just because your crossfader is beginning to bleed after 11 months.. Hell even I don't know much about that area of things - something I intend to fix on an upcoming article. In the meantime here's some homework - Google "distance selling".

But despite this torrent of ill feeling, they're still number one in the UK and growing steadily so they must be doing something right. Clearly there's still a huge and happy HTFR customer base.

So what do I think of HTFR?

Casting aside the internet rep and forming my own opinion - based on actually buying things in the past and spending time with the HTFR people - I'm pretty impressed. If I'm honest, I expected to find miserable wage slaves chained to desks being beaten with headphone cables, sitting knee deep in customer complaints. But what I actually saw was a friendly bunch of people, many who have worked there for a long time, all willing to answer any question no matter how awkward. I was given full access to all areas of the business - nothing was hidden, covered up or generally locked away so I wouldn't see the skeletons.

Everybody I spoke to had enthusiasm for HTFR and what they're trying to achieve, almost like a shared vision for the future. All areas of the company work together as a well oiled machine ensuring that your order makes it through from their sales department to your door in the fastest time with as little trouble as possible. Well... hopefully anyway.

Above all, I was struck with their willingness to hear about problems and importantly to acknowledge that they have in some ways earned the bad reputation a few years ago. But every effort appears to be being put into making that bad rep a thing of the past and more importantly making HTFR an even better experience.

Bottom Line

As of this review, I'm wiping the HTFR slate clean - resetting the HTFR repometer. I want to try and get a new and current opinion of HTFR rather than an inherited word of mouth internet based rumour. So should you run into any new problems, I'd like to know.

Obviously I can't personally guarantee that every order will go through without a problem, but my overall impression is one of confidence in HTFR delivering your product on time and at a price you're happy with. The systems are top notch, the staff seem to care and the range they offer is vast. The hardware prices are largely down to your negotiating skills and after sales issues are most likely to be resolved if you understand your rights better and don't bellow death threats at the HTFR staff.

The actual bottom line - from my personal experience and the apparent experience of many thousands of satisfied customers, HTFR are more than worthy of your attention and your cash. Give them a go and form your own opinion.

Word From The Top

To round this off I sent off a series of quickfire questions to HTFR's founder Jason Kirby.

What was the pre-HTFR Jason Kirby about? Computers What sparked the idea of selling vinyl from home? The Hacienda & Acid House Were you selling vinyl and still working? Yes At what point did you realise that you were onto something? When my mobile phone didn't stop ringing 24-7 What forced the move to premises rather than reorganising your bedroom some more? No Room! So you're in your new premises - what happened then? More Sales!! When did you decided to sell DJ gear and what was it? 1997 - Numark, Gemini and Vestax About vinyl - when did you begin to see a slip in sales? We haven't really At the height, how many vinyls did you sell in a year? 500,000 in 2002 Some say vinyl sales are growing - Have you seen this in your business? Yes About gear - how has the scene changed since HTFR started selling equipment? It hasn't really, just less fashion victims New people coming into the scene - are they going down the vinyl or digital route? Both Let's talk about the bad reputation - hand on heart, do you think that in some way it's been deserved? No, not if you knew how hard we've worked What's the most outrageous thing that's ever been claimed? My Dad is Ozzy Osbourne On a day to day basis, what are the biggest customer issues facing HTFR? Keeping all of the people happy all of the time

How do the staff react when they read forums filled with hate? The same way pop stars do when they read lies in the press So what has been done to address the problems? More hardwork How has the internet impacted on HTFR's business? We hate the Internet It's been said that high street stores are simply places to try stuff out before finding the best price online. Do you find this? Yes, I call it the Sony Centre effect In the past 5 years, technology has changed the DJ scene out of all recognition. Where do you see it going? It only makes it easier for the DJ,that's all Will we see HTFR selling laptops and projectors? Probably Music is going the way of digital downloads. What are your thoughts and are there plans to move into that market? No plans, there will only be one download store in the future Where will HTFR be in 1 year, 5 years? 10 years? An HTFR branch next to every McDonalds? I live on McDonalds,so i'm not sure i'll be around that long Of the 75 staff, around three quarters are DJs. But do you have a full DJ setup at home? If so, what is it? SL1200'S, Bozak Mixer, Mark Levison Amp, Levan loudspeakers, Koetsu Cartridges, Hacienda Mirrorball How much vinyl do you personally own? 250,000 What is your most prized record? And which is the most valuable? Johnny Mathis LP produced by Chic Will you ever stop selling vinyl? Even if it's from an old folks home in Bournemouth? No, but I prefer Blackpool A message for the people? When you want the truth, try vinyl