What makes a rental program valuable and effective?

You’ve decided to play the violin or your child has announced his or her intention to play the cello and you are faced with the perplexing situation of trying to find one to rent. A quick search of the internet and you’ve discovered that there are plenty of shops around that offer rental programs for these instruments. Your challenge is to figure out which program makes the most sense for you! Which program will optimize your experience!

I hope that by reading this article, you will gain some great insight into what makes a rental program valuable and effective. Of course, I hope you will see why we love our program… and hope you will too… but more important than that, I hope that you will launch your musical journey in a way that will create a lasting bond with this wonderful and amazing instrument. Do it right, and you’ll have a lifelong passion, and we hope that whatever you choose will achieve this! Read on, and we’ll help you evaluate your options!

My name is Oren Kronick, and my wife Kathy and I own Vermont Violins. For the past 28 years, we have been making violins, violas, celli, and basses available to clients throughout North America, and we are proud to have outfitted tens of thousands of players: adults and children alike. As the chief architect of our rental program, I have looked at hundreds of rental programs around the country, scrutinizing the terms and Conditions pages to see what others do. Over the years, we have tweaked and adjusted our program to make it stronger and stronger, and I am pretty confident that we have done a great job in building a program that offers significant value to our clients.

At the outset, I’ll tell you that our rental program is price competitive… rent from us, and you’ll pay the same, or less, than our local and national competitors. 

We check this annually.

So, maybe that ends the article: we are inexpensive, so, what, decision made? No… price is a consideration, but I’ll tell you that Price alone is not the ticket to success! It actually may be the least important consideration.

More important than price is value. What’s the difference between price and value?

If you are as old as I am, you’ll remember the Yugo. This Yugoslavian car was put on the market and achieved a level of commercial success on one proposition: it was cheap: new it cost around $3500 (under $10k in today's dollars). And this was enough to sell almost a million cars in the US during the 1980s.  

The Yugo was widely criticised. Car Talk called it the WORST CAR EVER MADE, and it was rife with mechanical issues and emissions problems. Spare parts were hard to come by, and it was widely considered to be pretty darned ugly too!

But it was cheap. If the price was the only consideration, the YUGO would have been the dominant car on the market, but of course, wise auto-consumers everywhere looked beyond the price tag and opted instead for other cars when all the considerations were made. 1980 cars from other manufacturers can still be seen on the highways, but Yugos? Not so much.

So, when we speak about value in a rental program, we are considering the price, but also a lot of other considerations. Quality, Flexibility, ability to Customize, Generous Equity accumulation and equity transferability, Great Service and Value add like product discounts….these all are part of a rental SYSTEM that collectively defines the success of a rental program, the ultimate Value. Value is how much you get for every dollar you spend. Spend too little, and you may not get much value, and your experience with this instrument will be sadly limited.

SO let’s break it down and chat about some of these things so you can get a stronger understanding of what I’m chatting about when I say we offer a high-value rental program!

Quality:

Let’s start by talking about Quality. Not all violins are the same…that’s for sure. Depending on how they are made, what woods are used, and how much care is given to the tone quality, an instrument can sound better or worse, or be easier or harder to play.  

Some people don’t think it matters. “Oh, my child has never played before, she doesn’t need a good instrument” Well, we beg to differ.

Sure, we don’t think you should spend too much on a beginner’s violin, but while it’s true that you don’t need to spend thousands on your first violin, spending too little can cause a lot of frustration. If a violin is not capable of making a good sound, you or your child will get frustrated. 

Frustration leads to failure = a premature quit, an end to the musical journey. What you want is a violin that plays a little better than you do: it’s like buying clothes for a child; you get clothes that have a little growing room, but you don’t buy adult clothes either!

There is no time in the violin journey that quality counts more. With no tools in the toolbox, you won’t be able to adjust for a poorly made instrument. So, don’t spend too much, but spend enough.

Vermont Violins offers four levels of rentals to work with players at any level from beginner to professional. Our Prelude level, the starter instrument, is a great violin with an excellent core tone. The brand, Eastman Strings, is the leading maker of student instruments and they get kids off to the best possible start. All the angles are correct, the tone is clear and expressive, and you’ll hear this in great music. Kids bond with their instruments, and that is what we want.

And they are visually beautiful too! The initial connection, what we see every day in our shop when we give a child or adult their first instrument, is a huge connection to the visual aesthetic of a wonderful instrument. Vermont Violins’ fleet of rental instruments is in perfect condition, and we are really careful to cull instruments that are terribly scratched or certainly damaged… we want total love!

And, unlike most shops, Vermont Violins does not send out instruments with used strings. 

We change every string between rentals as we refurbish the entire instrument.  

And, we even install Wittner Perfection pegs in every Concert and Premier instrument. 

These are pegs that have micro-gears inside that allow you to fine-tune right in the pegbox and they never slip and don’t react to the weather. Up here in Vermont that is a big deal! Pegs can be incredibly frustrating and this solves the problem!

A poor instrument will almost certainly ensure that your child will not enjoy playing. 

It costs money to make good instruments, but don’t set your child up with a Yugo (sorry Yugo) violin….be willing to seek out something beautiful that he or she can truly bond with to create great music successfully.

Equity:

Another important consideration is equity. Rentals are a great way to start, but if you or your child take to it, eventually you will want to own an instrument of your own! A good rental program will allow you to equitize some or most of your rent: money paid in rent should apply in part towards the ultimate purchase.

Most rental programs do have an equity component. But every contract has a different formula and here again the devil is in the details. Good programs will be generous in both how the equity accumulates and how it may be applied. More generous equity yields higher value.

Some shops try to encourage a shorter rental life. In these programs, equity accumulates quickly for a short or limited period (sometimes up to a year) and then a shart drop-off in equity once the initial high-yielding term is over. It's not uncommon to see shops give 80-100% of rental payments towards purchase but then only 20% in future years. 

Remember that kids start on very small instruments and move through lots of sizes so ownership of small instruments is not necessarily a great thing. If the equity drops, and you rent for a long time, you can find yourself in a situation where you have rented for years and have very little equity.

If you have a high-value instrument, like one of Vermont Violin’s Eastman rentals, and are paying a low rent as we try to offer, you will be in our rental program for quite a while. We offer 2/3 equity: that means that 2/3 of all your rental payments will be applied towards the purchase and that equity will travel from instrument to instrument as your child grows into either bigger instruments or higher-level instruments like those of our Concert or Premier rental programs.

Flexible Equity: that’s important! Can you apply the equity towards any other instrument, or do you have to purchase the instrument you are renting? What are the limitations: can you apply the equity towards higher-level instruments, or are you limited to just instruments of the same rental level? Kids are not static, nor are you if you are an adult player. 

They grow, they advance, their tastes change and you want your equity to be available to you no matter what direction you, she, or he goes!  

Check out our website where we have some great charts that show you how high value and good equity accrual work together to make sure that you are maximizing your rental experience! Equity is a tough thing to understand and I’ve seen a lot of tricky maneuvers to make it hard to compare one program to another. Be a savvy consumer and make sure you understand this! 

Remember, the goal is to achieve ownership for kids and adults who love playing and that ownership should be of an instrument that sings and resonates with your soul. Don’t get stuck with an instrument you don’t like!

Ability to Customize:

Vermont Violins knows that your playing experience is going to be different from someone else’s, and we do not want to cookie-cutter everyone’s rental program. 

What works for one family may not work for another so we have created a program that has a lot of customizable features that give flexibility and adaptability.

I’ll confess… Vermont Violins rental program is complicated! There are a lot of options! If we offered only one violin, one term well, that would be simple and SO easy to explain. But life is complicated, so we want you to be able to customize your rental to fit you and your family’s needs. For this reason, we give you choices. You can choose a quality level: Prelude for beginners, Concerts for Intermediate players, Premier violins for advancing students, and Premier 2 for advanced or professional players.

Then, we offer different term lengths:  you can rent for 3 months, 6 months, or 12 months at a time. Some families are keen to have their child just try out an instrument, see if it’s something he or she wants to do. They don’t want to make it a high-pressure situation and they are unsure if their child really will take to it. So starting with a short, low commitment, the term makes a lot of sense.  

My family didn’t work like that though. My parents told all three of us that music education is not optional, and we all had to choose an instrument and play it. We were told (in second grade) that we could quit when we were in 10th grade…a lifetime away. So of course it would make sense for families like mine to rent for our longest term!  

And we even make the Damage Waiver optional as well! In some situations, the risk of damage is not high, and folks prefer to just pay as they go for any damage. Other families would not think of renting something as fragile as a violin without some sort of insurance. So our optional damage protection is a great add-on but is not required.

As a thank you for renting from us, we automatically enroll you in our PRODIGE REWARDS discount club. This loyalty program is completely free to our rental clients and it gives you an automatic 10% discount on any accessories that you may need: rosin, shoulder rests, spare strings, sheet music: we offer this discount on all these things and more for our rental clients.

We love our rental clients, and we love getting kids and adults started on this new musical journey. At Vermont Violins, we want you to be a part of our community…. and we want to be a part of yours! We are always looking for ways that we can go beyond the rental program to create opportunities for success. We have rewards-based practice clubs, fun holiday games (like our annual violin-shaped cookie competition), performance opportunities and we donate generously to your children’s musical arts educations: music schools, orchestras, touring groups, and summer camps. So, remember that a company that cares about your child’s holistic experience is more likely to share with your general community than one that is simply looking for the shorter-term gain of maximum profit.

In short, the key to selecting a good rental program is to read the fine print, widen your evaluation metrics beyond just the price to a consideration of a program’s value. Get the most from every dollar you spend on instrument rental by getting the highest quality, the best equity, the most flexibility and customization opportunities in a program like that offered by Vermont Violins. I hope you’ll invite us into your or your child’s musical life. 

We are available six days a week to answer any questions you might have! Thanks very much, and enjoy the magical journey playing violin, viola, cello, bass, or harp.