Yes, the opening of the new Gibson Garage in London is part of the relaunch into Europe as a whole. There are a lot of complicated moving parts.
Extra work? - check
Pressure? - check
Opportunity? - good question, I hope so.
This has been an enormous project. Our main transformer vendor decided to simply shut down at the beginning of COVID rather than follow through with the project of updating all of out transformers for the new (primarily EU driven) safety standard. I inherited the job (of global regulatory engineer) to bring all of our transformers forward with a new vendor who proved to be far better at this than I feared. This included a formal analysis and redesign of about 60 different parts, then building samples, testing for tone/operation and then safety. At the same time, we needed to bring all of our guitar amp models forward to the new safety standards, including testing and certification. The bass amps which I designed were already designed and tested to the new standard so that wasn't an issue, but the global relaunch includes all products, not just bass.
As this project started, COVID completely hammered the supply chain. We had components within the transformers that were not available because the factories producing the parts and materials were locked down, workers were sick, our factory had to close for a few months, even the test lab we used fell far behind because
their workers couldn't work together in the same spaces. In my 40+ years as an engineer I have never worked under conditions like this, and part of my career was in the touring side of the audio business where things are rarely predictable and always scrappy. To say I'm glad this project is over would be a huge understatement, but I have to say that Gibson was a great partner through all of this.
