| When Dean Markely started he didn't have the market to get distribution from the large jobbers, so he worked with very small jobbers to get his product into stores. He promised them that if and when the company got bigger he'd still treat them as partners. He didn't. Wouldn't give them the same price break he gave Midco, Eddy Torpek, Harris-Teller, etc. So they couldn't afford to sell the string to stores any more.
But even more, when they came out the company's hype was that they'd last longer. We had a selection of his strings (electric and acoustic guitar in several gauges). We got folks to try them, and most of them either hated them or liked them except for really short life. Dean called me directly to find out what people thought. I told him the feedback I was getting. He was cool at first, and figured he had bad batches. So he sent us new strings and we gave them to folks we knew who had tried them earlier.
Same responses, pretty much across the board. When he called to find out why we weren't ordering any more, and I told him people didn't like them, he got abusive, foul mouthed, and ranted on for a long while about my, the owner of the store, and our customers being idiots and other worse names.
Given that at the time he wasn't actually building strings (they were made by the Sterlingworth company, which the Markely company eventually bought) and we got great customer service from GHS and D'Addario, there was no reason to do any business with him. My time in the retail music biz was great for most of the folks I dealt with but three companies (well, two individuals and one large corporation) really soured me on their products.
Besides Mr. Markely, Paul Reed Smith was an abusive jerk who got really steamed when I told him what I thought of his first issue bass. It was really well made, and felt great. But it was stupid expensive and had a lot of useless sounds with a limited pallet of useable sounds. He ranted about "mindless Fender thumpers" and I left his NAMM both. Great guitars, but not a good person in my experience.
And Gibson Guitars. No matter who owns them they're arrogant turds. For the 30+ years I've been around the music biz, they always have had this attitude. Walk into a store in a college town with a population of about 80,000 and demand that you carry $30,000 worth of Gibson product from across the whole line (high-end carved archtop guitars, banjos, mandolins, those awful Mark series acoustics, etc.) in order to be able to stock Les Pauls, 335s, and SG. And tell the store it's not Gibson's concern whether the store makes any money, sell them at a loss if that's what it takes to move the product. One sales rep asked me why I thought Fender was more important to me than Gibson. I said "Les Paul, ES-335 vs. Strat, Tele, Twin Reverb, Super Reverb, Jazz Bass, Precision Bass." He didn't get it.
jte | 
