As a kid growing up in Indianapolis, Scott Marquart would often get his dad to drop him off at the local Guitar Center, where he would spend hours playing different instruments. To justify the time spent in the store, he would purchase one of the cheapest items available: a box of guitar strings for $6. When he got home, he would mix and match the strings from each pack, ultimately creating a custom set that sounded better than anything he could buy off the shelf.
After college, Marquart continued his experiments, ultimately turning his love of musical tinkering into a business. From the attic of a house he shared with four other guys, their girlfriends, and three dogs, Marquart launched Stringjoy in 2014 with $500—the total savings he earned as a bartender in Nashville. Today the brand is sold in 600 stores around the globe, from mom-and-pop music shops to large chains like Guitar Center and Sweetwater.
Marquart credits his success selling in the Amazon store with making Stringjoy attractive to retailers, and ultimately turning the fledgling company into an international brand.
“We’ve built this organic foundation of players that discovered us on Amazon and that really love our product,” he said. “Many of our larger partnerships have come in based on that.”
It’s the superior sound quality of the strings, manufactured one at a time, that has inspired Stringjoy’s loyal customers to share the love. After acquiring machines that let him build guitar strings from scratch, Marquart started to play with different techniques to create a much better guitar string than what was currently available.
Marquart noted that the price of guitar strings have remained same price since the ’50s–something he says has affected quality over the years. Adjusted for inflation, a guitar string that cost the equivalent of $60 in 1950 was selling for $6 today, meaning many manufacturers had to cut corners.
“By 2014, you landed at this place where a lot of the magic that went into crafting these great guitar strings had just eroded over time,” said Marquart.
He vowed to bring that magic back by crafting each string with care, and really paying attention to the process and materials that go into production. Today, Stringjoy sells over 150 products, from string sets for electric, acoustic and bass guitars, as well as mandolins and banjos, to accessories like picks, straps and guitar care kits.
In 2017, Marquart started selling Stringjoy sets in the Amazon store, using Amazon A+ Content to bring his brand’s story to life.
“Amazon has been great at helping us acquire new customers, and that’s been due in part to A+ Content, which allows us to make our product pages feel very interactive and very much like our brand,” he said. “By telling our story through videos and images on each product page, we’ve been able to take someone who isn’t familiar with us and convince them that we’re really what they should be buying.”
It’s a strategy that’s paid off, with Stringjoy’s Amazon sales growing 130% year-over-year. Marquart also uses feedback from Amazon reviews to quality control his sets—an important task given the rigorous standards he sets to ensure every one of his strings is of the highest caliber.
“A customer might write in to say, ‘hey, I found this one string to be a little uneven with the others in the set.’ That’s amazing feedback,” said Marquart. “Amazon reviews have proven super valuable in helping us find ways to make those incremental improvements along our product line.”
As Stringjoy’s business has grown, so has its impact on Nashville’s musician community. Today, the company employs 25 people who make strings by one at a time from a factory in Nashville—most of whom are local guitar players.
“Hiring actual musicians to make the product at every step has just brought a different level of care to our strings,” said Marquart. “They come at it with this attitude of, ‘if I were using these strings for a really important gig, how would I want them to sound?’ Well, they’d want them to sound perfect.”