From his Garage then, to 125 Stores in 7 Countries now, meet GrooveWasher
Get Steve Chase waxing melodic about the evolution of the recording industry and in particular, vinyl records, and his eyes glimmer with the acuity of a diamond stylus. The gushing enthusiasm for his musical pastime and his company, GrooveWasher, is tempered only by a 35-year career in the banking industry: measured passion.
Following a path part legacy and part cliché, Steve birthed GrooveWasher in his garage. Its roots track back to record albums’ halcyon days of the late 1960s. He credits his early relationship with Bruce Maier, PhD, in Columbia, MO for GrooveWasher’s origins. “He was an avid audiophile and professor of microbiology,” Chase says. “He introduced me to high-end audio and it was about three years later that (Maier) started the Discwasher company.”
Discwasher packaged a walnut-handled brush that supported a patented fabric applicator and a bottle of cleaning solution. Ultimately DiscWasher, like record sales’ themselves, withered with the advent of cassette tapes and then compact discs and ultimately digital downloads. But vinyl’s final pressing has yet to be cast. The promotional banding of Independent record stores, and a trickling of new pressings spawned vinyl’s resurgence starting about ten years ago.
Meantime, Chase, who had never abandoned his love for vinyl, sought ways to maintain and clean his collection. Seeking to beat the standards DiscWasher set in the early 1970s, he began tinkering with local walnut and chemicals and microfibers in his garage.
Maier’s patents, Chase says, provided insights into a recipe for recreating those early cleaning solutions. “Researching his patent descriptions, I found surfactants and wetting agents that were not available in the 70s,” Chase reports. Urged by his son, a recording artist and recording engineer, and backed by local entrepreneurs and investors, Chase launched the new family business, GrooveWasher, in 2015. This confluence of passion and enterprise was natural to Chase, who had launched and invested in several startups in his own right.
Today GrooveWasher’s production facility is a cornerstone of designWerx in North Kansas City. Occupying roughly 4,000 square feet there, Chase can be found daily with his brother Kirt sanding, painting, selling, shipping and billing the handful of products and packaging options GrooveWasher offers.
In addition to his own out-of-pocket investments, money from his family, local investors and friends, Chase laid the financial foundation to GrooveWasher through a crowd-funding campaign, early sales on GrooveWasher’s website and old-fashioned cold-calling.
Judy Mills, founder of Westport’s Mills Records recalls her first introduction to GrooveWasher. “They literally walked in off the street. They were very generous with the product,” she says. “We sell a lot of used records and we started using GrooveWasher to clean them before putting them out for sale.”
She also merchandises a competitor, but GrooveWasher’s walnut wand carries an air of nostalgia that uniquely positions it among her customers. “It’s aesthetically pleasing. There’s nothing else like it,” she says.
“We raised about $12,000 on our Kickstarter campaign,” Chase says,” and from that we developed 194 brand champions. They are regular customers and we treat them like royalty, offering discounts and announcements of new products.”
Through direct sales on his website, he says he’s cultivated the same type of relationships with more than 900 additional consumers. He sells direct to 125 independent record and audio stores in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Singapore, Ireland and Holland. The company’s exclusive US distributor (URP Music Distributors) sells the products to an additional 1,000 independent record stores in the US and beyond. GrooveWasher can also be found on Amazon and eBay.
The trajectory of the business, Chase contends, is nurturing the independent record store owner and developing mass channels that can offer his lower-tier product, one that replaces the walnut-handle brush with a cleaning cloth.
His business is built on two distinct demographics, “the buyers of records fall in two groups: older folks like me who love the re-mastered rock and pop classics and young people who have discovered the tactile and auditory experience of contemporary music on new vinyl.”
According to Nielsen Music’s 2018 sales report 16.8 million albums sold in the U.S. last year. It was the 13th consecutive year of growth and represented 14.6 percent year-over-year growth for the medium.
As for Chase, he’s awash in optimism and a commitment to a superior product with recognized value. Success is in the ear of the beholder, but critics report he’s tracking.
“There’s clearly a lot of passion, research, and expertise that’s gone into the GrooveWasher project,” writes Marc Henshall at Britain’s Sound Matters. “Misinformation and poorly thought out products are all too common in the vinyl world — especially as more companies seek to profit from the vinyl revival. It’s encouraging to see a start-up like GrooveWasher commit to picking up where the classic Discwasher left off to help the next generation realize the full potential and joy of the vinyl listening experience.”
Find GrooveWasher online here:
- https://www.groovewasher.com/
- https://www.facebook.com/groovewasher
- https://www.instagram.com/groove.washer/
This story was originally published January 23, 2019 at 2:27 PM.