Remember The Gibson Firebird X ?

[gardo]

 

https://www.musicradar.com/news/gibson-just-destroyed-100s-of-firebird-x-guitars-heres-why

[jtr654]

Look like the right thing to do.

 

[WRGKMC]

I hate seeing companies destroy goods like that.   In fact it pisses me off as a builder  I have no doubt most guitarists would feel the same way.  There's no reason the raw materials and components couldn't be recycled.  When you figure its been about 10 years since Gibson was having Government raids on imported woods.  Now that the political heat is off them they think its OK to destroy instruments that way.  This is a perfect example of the arrogance still infesting Gibson management.  Do they think a move like that will make guitarists like the company more, or is it an arrogant act by management designed to piss guitarists off? 

That wasn't a shot of guitars being burned in an incinerator at the factory where things like that are done privately.   They used a tank of all things. You wonder why their instruments cost so much? wasting it on stupid stunts like that is surely part of it. Failing to recycle is the other.   

If they guitars are truly garbage, destroy them privately or recycle them for their metals and woods.  If Gibson had a decent engineer instead of lame assed sales department who don't know how to market themselves out of a paper box, they could repurpose those instruments into something else and at least break even on what it cost them in materials.  If the instrument plays well, you could easily remove everything active, including those tuners and install passive parts which have worked for generations.  market them as a  2 for 1 sale or buy one get one for free if you want to get rid of them quickly. 

Hopefully they fired their logistics manager as well.  Anyone who allows that many instruments to be built without customers lined up to buy them is an idiot.  Granted you may save buying resources in bulk but why assemble them before you have open orders.  Gibson like so many manufacturers are decades behind the curve when it comes to managing the way they do business.  My company sells about a million a quarter in business gear.  We don't order anything till we have a signature and verified payment.  From there it takes about a week to order, setup and install the equipment.  Our warehouse is mostly empty.  We don't need to keep millions of dollars in gear on hand.  Even the manufacturer doesn't store more then a months worth at a time.  It makes no sense business wise to lock all that cash up in stock if you don't have a sales force moving them out the door every day.    

 

 

[gardo]

Gibson claims they were unsafe, unsalvageable and just needed to clear them off the books .  It does seem like they could have handled things a little better.

[Ancient Mariner]

Proving that no publicity is bad publicity - we're all talking about new Gibson guitars, right? 😉

[gardo]

22 minutes ago, Ancient Mariner said:

Proving that no publicity is bad publicity - we're all talking about new Gibson guitars, right? 😉

Hey , look what the tide washed in.

Good to hear from you 

[Ancient Mariner]

3 minutes ago, gardo said:

Hey , look what the tide washed in.

Good to hear from you 

 

Thanks for the welcome.

 

I drop by occasionally, but I'm playing a lot less these days and guitar tends to take a back seat. Play acoustic slide in a gospel blues band mostly now, speed having diminished and the hands not really being strong enough to seriously keep up these days.

[gardo]

23 minutes ago, Ancient Mariner said:

 

Thanks for the welcome.

 

I drop by occasionally, but I'm playing a lot less these days and guitar tends to take a back seat. Play acoustic slide in a gospel blues band mostly now, speed having diminished and the hands not really being strong enough to seriously keep up these days.

Sounds like my kind of music 👍🏼

[Ancient Mariner]

5 minutes ago, gardo said:

Sounds like my kind of music 👍🏼

www.gospelbell.com

 

It's twangy - don't say I didn't warn you.

[gardo]

8 hours ago, Ancient Mariner said:

www.gospelbell.com

 

It's twangy - don't say I didn't warn you.

I think I found it . Are you out Oxfordshire and Warwickshire,  I like what I heard. 
 

[Ancient Mariner]

11 hours ago, gardo said:

I think I found it . Are you out Oxfordshire and Warwickshire,  I like what I heard. 
 

Yes, that's us - and thank you. It's a bit of a collective, with a couple of core guys that sing & lead - it makes for a lot of fun with different feels according to who's there, but can be slightly hard work if you're the only instrument that can do solos and have to find something orignal to say each time.

[6down1togo]

This is actually really old news that was a consequence of the leadership change at Gibson.

Gibson was left with an unsold inventory of FirebirdX guitars written off and had to destroy them in order to take the accounting loss. According to Gibson, the guitars' interface software system was obsolete (Windows 7 SP1 (32 bit or 64-bit) or Mac OS X Snow Leopard, 10.6.4 or later) which rendered the guitars unusable even if donated to a charity. You could not simply plug them in and play them as you would a conventional guitar. The guitars' components were not reusable and/or the cost of reclaiming usable components prohibitive so the destruction and the attendant accounting loss was the only viable option, but really should have been done behind the scenes.

Apparently someone at Gibson thought it would be a great PR coup to run over the unsold FirebirdX inventory with a bulldozer/excavator and kill 2 Firebirds with one stone. They could destroy them in an act symbolic of Gibson's "new direction" and the tearing down of the former dictator's (Henry J) misdirected work. Perhaps their thinking was that Gibson should be reinventing itself as a cooler and edgier.

The decision to make the disposal a social media event was questionable and even further tainted by presenting it as "a leaked video". I was a PR disaster in my mind.but in a few years, everyone forgets and moves on.