The owners app
Every instrument leaves Rockaway with a serial number. Then it goes quiet.
Vintage Vibe builds an instrument by hand, ships it, and loses sight of it. The owner comes back years later needing one hammer tip and has to guess which of three hundred and seventy-seven parts fits. This is the app that keeps the thread.
Four screens
Register the serial. Everything else follows from it.
These are concept screens, drawn in code for this proposal. Nothing here is a live product yet. Every number, part name and artist on them comes from Vintage Vibe's own site.
Register
What did we build for you?
The number is stamped inside the lid, left of the harp.
One field. In return, the buyer gets the build record of their own instrument: finish, action, preamplifier, ship date. Vintage Vibe gets an owner list it has never had.
The bench
Owners, this week
Classic 64 · VV‑64C‑2870
Swapped the hammer tips at year six. The top octave came back.
Deluxe 73 · VV‑73D‑1109
Voice control at four, tremolo slow. The whole record is that setting.
Marquis 73 · VV‑73M‑3904
Anyone in Chicago done a tine replacement? Looking for a tech.
Owners posting what they changed, with the serial attached. Vintage Vibe's fifty-eight reviews already read like this. The app turns them into a place people come back to.
Rigs
Dial in someone else's sound
The artist page on the current site is a wall of names. Here each name carries knob positions an owner can copy onto their own instrument in ten seconds.
Your action · VV‑73M‑4412
Tap any part. We already know which one your serial takes.
Ordered together with this part: hammer combs, damper felt, tine grommets.
Order the set · $184.00 Find a tech near meThe signature screen. Three hundred and seventy-seven replacement parts become a picture of your own action. Tap the hammer tip, get the tip that fits your serial, order seventy-three of them.
Why this app and not another one
The catalogue is already there. The instrument is the missing index.
Products in the store
Three hundred and seventy-seven of them are replacement parts. Searching that list by keyword is how an owner currently finds a hammer tip.
Instruments in the store
The three pianos are on a second website, on a second platform. The sale-terms page says it plainly: sale "excludes Vintage Vibe Pianos".
Owners, since then
Every instrument sold since the shop opened, with no register of who owns what. Each one of those owners is a repeat parts customer that nobody can reach.
What it changes
Four things happen the day the register exists.
- The owner
Stops guessing part numbers. The diagram knows the serial, so the basket is right the first time.
- The shop
Sees which parts wear out at which age on which model. That is a production schedule, drawn from real instruments rather than reorder points.
- The technicians
The fourteen listed service centres get routed work from owners nearby, with the build record attached before they open the lid.
- The company
Keeps a relationship with 700 instruments built and 5,000 restorations, instead of meeting each owner once at the moment of purchase.