COPING WITH COVID: ReAcoustic

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Coping with COVID

SC Biz News is speaking with small businesses and community leaders about the impact of the new coronavirus on business and industry, and how this is changing how they operate.
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In 2012, a feature in an American Express Departures magazine amplified ReAcoustic’s antique speaker sales from a local audience to worldwide attention.

“I could not have asked for a better target market,” said Ryan Boase, ReAcoustic founder and craftsman. “These are all top American Express cardholders from all over the country and all over the world. I think I ended up getting orders from over 30 different countries, and I had a waitlist in the hundreds waiting for me to find these antiques.”

The explosion of online purchases allowed Boase to take his new business refashioning gramophones and phonographs into usable art to full time less than a year after he began tinkering with ideas and broken instruments in his garage. The artist explained the phonographs he repurposes were made during a narrow band of decades around 1900 before being eclipsed by the next generation of gramophones and tube radio horns.

Horned speakers went out of vogue in the 1930s and are now in scarce supply, so Boase has relied on a dense web of antiques dealers across the country to sustain his inventory, which is also diversified with brass instruments.

“Everything from as small as a trumpet or a cornet to as big as a sousaphone, I’ve turned into a speaker at this point,” he said.

In the past, the two-time Artisphere exhibitor’s greatest challenge was keeping up with customer demands. Now, as ReAcoustic’s income from 20 to 25 art shows per year dries up because of cancellations, Boase is selling untouched antiques rather than refurbishing them.

“You could never have anticipated when we first heard that there was some illness in China, that all of my art shows were going to be shut down and my business would come to a standstill,” he said, adding that ReAcoustics falls just short of all the federal funding opportunities he’s explored, for one reason or another.

Despite its online boom a decade ago, about 90% of ReAcoustic’s revenue stems from in-person purchases. Boase knows few people are purchasing art, utilitarian or not, when unemployment is at an all-time high. Almost all of Boase’s speaker sales have screeched to a halt, and he fears that for a variety of reasons, he won’t be able to access funding streams for small businesses.

Boase said he can’t file for unemployment because he is a sole proprietor.

He also doubts he would be eligible for Payroll Protection Program forgiveness, as most of the contract employees he used to streamline each 10-day art project were college students who have returned home for the semester and are unlikely to return before June 30.

In the past, ReAcoustic had enough capital upfront to function without credit, and Boase said he didn’t want to deal with the stress of overhanging debt.

Now, that leaves him with little credit history to qualify his business for the program through his local bank.

“I’ve had a business account with them in perfect standing, but I never accepted a credit card from them when they offered it to me every time I went in there. Now that I don’t have a credit card, I don’t have a borrowing history with them,” he said.

In the meantime, Boase hopes that antique resales, online promotions like the Departures feature and emergency savings will help him bridge the gap until he can hit the road and start playing his speakers to live art show audiences across the country again.

Still, he’s nervous about how long he and other artists can hold out.

“I’m curious what all of these other artists are doing, too,” he said. “I’m trying to keep plenty of emergency funds, because you know you’ll have a bad show or something. So, you try to keep a certain amount in there just because of the odds. Something is going to happen sometime, and you may need to cover a show you weren’t able to go to, but you don’t anticipate all of them stopping.”