Long & McQuade

Where the Music Begins
Long and McQuade’s love of music is reflected
in the business that bears their names
I N N O V A T I O N
Musical instruments were always more than a product for Jack
Long. In fact, he was still working as a professional trumpet
player when he began selling King Band Instruments from the
second floor of a Carlton Street house, and could usually be
found heading to a gig after a full day of sales.
It was obviously tiring work. On one
occasion, he even fell asleep while
playing a trumpet fanfare.
There was simply no escaping the draw of the business.
Jack McQuade, who had been teaching drum lessons in one
of Long’s two small Carleton Street studios, became a business
partner within six months. Their first Yorkville retail outlet
was opened in the midst of Canada’s emerging rock scene,
and Peter Traynor could soon be found building his speaker
cabinets and amplifiers upstairs.
“It was a pretty happening music store,”
Jeff Long recalls, referring to his dad’s first
Yonge Street location. “It was sort of the
meeting place for musicians.”
It is the type of
success which
leads to growth.
By the time Jeff
joined his father as a part-time employee in 1979, there were
six stores in all. But Long and McQuade soon realized that
dreams of catalogues and other marketing initiatives would
require further expansions – ultimately creating a national
chain anchored by a head office and warehouse in Pickering.
There are now 52 retail locations across the country.
Traynor’s early speaker-building efforts have evolved into
Yorkville Sound’s 150,000-square-foot manufacturing facility,
while Long and McQuade’s business occupies another
20,000 square feet and will soon expand into another
50,000-square-foot structure just down the road.
The Pickering warehouse even supports a national online
presence that sells as many instruments as one of the chain’s
mid-sized stores. “I never thought people would buy a guitar
online like they do,” Long admits, suggesting that most online
sales were expected to be limited to electronic offerings like
MIDI modules.
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Long & McQuade
Musical Instruments
www.long-mcquade.com
I N N O V A T I O N
As much as the business has evolved, however, many of its
successful strategies can still be traced back to the earliest
stores. A program used to rent instruments is based on
friends who asked to borrow products, while the in-house
financing program evolved from casual agreements to spread
out payments. Programs like these were certainly unusual,
especially when early music retailers operating much like
pawn shops where all sales were final, Long adds. “Rock
and roll stores used to be thrown together. ”
While some manufacturers have moved
assembly lines to offshore locales, Yorkville
Sound also remains one of the only Canadian
makers of guitar amplifiers. “We do everything
there,” Long notes with pride, referring to
the maker of professional sound equipment.
“We design the product, the engineering is
done there. The quality control is done there.
We’re really vertically integrated.”
largest retail markets in the nation. Eleven of the music
retailer’s stores are located in this region, and a new full
line store will soon be added to the mix at the intersection
of Notion Road and Highway 2.
Think of this as the place where music begins.
And whenever any of the related products need to be
shipped, the Pickering warehouse offers quick access to
Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe, which remains one of the
DURHAM REGION
ONTARIO, CANADA
605 ROSSLAND ROAD EAST Ajax Pickering
ONTARIO L1N 6A3 Brock Scugog
1.800.706.9857 Clarington Uxbridge
www.durhambusiness.ca Oshawa Whitby