![]() What Henry Ford did with the manufacture of cars, HOHNER was doing with harmonicas. HOHNER started working with new ideas on how to manufacture, new ways of making the harmonica reeds and mass production. It was innovation.” It was the middle of the industrial revolution. Reyes continued, “It wasn’t just selling. By 1907 they had sold around two million harmonicas. They went from minimal harmonica sales to millions. The United States took the lead and became its number one distributor of harmonicas. In 1901, HOHNER opened its first offices in New York. It wasn’t planned, but it worked, and the company started growing little by little. That trend turned into a distribution channel as families loaded their possessions, along with the harmonicas, and then sold the small instruments in America. Eventually Hohner started selling his harmonicas to emigrant families who were leaving their home countries and moving to the United States. ![]() “He didn't realize that he was going to change the music industry forever,” Reyes said with a smile. It intrigued him, so he started making and producing harmonicas too. One day, as the story goes, Hohner saw someone making harmonicas. At the time, Matthias Hohner was a clockmaker in Trossingen, Germany. Let’s go back over a hundred years to 1857 and meet Matthias Hohner, the founder of what is now HOHNER Music. It’s a story that Reyes wove for me with his soft-spoken passion for the accordion and its history. To see how far HOHNER has come and the impact of the business, we have to go back in time to the beginning of the story-one that didn't start with accordion. I came in and nobody knew anything about accordions.” We didn't have new products, we weren't reaching out to the communities and we weren't doing anything innovative. I thought that, in a few years, HOHNER was not going to be relevant in the accordion world at all, period. “When I came on board in 2008, accordions were on life support. He went on to talk about the state of the instrument when he first began with HOHNER. A third-generation diatonic player and product manager for HOHNER, Reyes has been a major advocate for the accordion, especially in Latino circles. The visuals offer a hint of Reyes’ extensive involvement with HOHNER and the accordion world. Off to one side stood a gold diatonic accordion displayed with a photo that could have been Flaco Jiménez-one of the best-known conjunto players in the United States. The wall behind him was lined with various diatonic HOHNER accordions in colors ranging from gold to white, to a sleek matte-black model. I think what kept us afloat is the harmonicas … Accordions were a different story,” Gilbert Reyes said, thoughtfully, during our Zoom video interview. “HOHNER has survived recessions, wars, depressions, pandemics.
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