Inside the Thomann warehouse: how the world’s biggest online music retailer ships 40,000 orders a day
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70 years ago, Treppendorf was a small, sleepy village surrounded by Bavarian forests and farmland, deep in the German countryside. With barely a couple of hundred inhabitants and no major urban centres nearby, it seems an unlikely place to birth the world’s biggest online music retailer – but there’s a lot of things about Thomann that challenge convention.
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When Hans Thomann Sr – a farmer’s son with a huge passion for playing the trumpet – decided in 1954 that he was going to run a musical instrument out of the family home right there in Treppendorf, his neighbours must have wondered exactly what he hoped to achieve. After all, in those days, musical instrument retail was an exclusively in-person affair, focused on large towns and cities where they had the footfall to attract enough customers to make the business a success – how exactly would they be able to compel musicians to drive out to a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere?
The original Thomann store was the old family farmhouse (Image: Thomann)
But attract them they did – driven by an ethos that has been instilled in Thomann’s current CEO, Hans Thomann Jr, since he first started helping out in the family store when he was just six or seven years old.
“I always listen to my customers,” Hans explains. “When I was young, I had two great goals. Number one goal is – I will have the best prices. And number two – I will have all the great products that my customer is looking for.”
Treppendorf Today
The size of Thomann’s current operation dwarfs the village of Treppendorf – and it’s growing all the time. (Image: Thomann)
In 2024, Treppendorf is still a small, sleepy village surrounded by forests and farmland – as you drive through the narrow roads into the town, you’re greeted by small clumps of charming red-roofed Bavarian houses and a few small farmholds, but there’s one big difference.
Long gone is the farmhouse from which Thomann originally operated – using converted barns to store gear, and displaying guitars on repurposed meathooks hung from the ceiling.
Thomann is now the world’s largest online musical instrument retailer, and its Treppendorf home has come to dwarf the village that it grew from. While there are still just 170-ish permanent residents of the town, Thomann itself employs over 1,700 people in its HQ. This not only comprises Europe’s largest brick and mortar music store (which after expansions are completed in 2025 will be comfortably the largest in the world) but also Europe’s largest eCommerce warehouse – not for musical instruments, full stop.
The Thomann warehouse is larger than any individual Amazon site in Europe – or any other online retailer you want to think about. There are over 100,000 different items stored in this warehouse – which includes everything from guitars and amps to bridges, picks, straps, stands… if you can use it in your music making process, Thomann sells it, and it’s likely sitting under the grass-covered roof somewhere.
Europe’s Biggest Warehouse
The huge guitar room in Thomann’s store has pretty much every guitar you could ever dream of playing. (Image: Thomann)
Unless you’ve been to Treppendorf – and Hans explains that every Saturday around 2,000 music fans make the pilgrimage to visit the store – it’s hard to fully convey the scale of the thing. Despite it doing an excellent job of hiding itself in the Bavarian countryside, it’s hard to miss something that comprises over 1 million cubic metres of volume.
It’s also hard to miss the trucks – Hans explains that every two minutes of every day, a delivery truck will either arrive or leave Thomann. They need to as well – up to 40,000 orders and 100,000 items shipped every day, including something like 900 guitars. Every week, Hans explains, Thomann receives several trucks from Fender and Gibson – which are packed to the rafters with hundreds of instruments ready to be sent up to Thomann’s huge on-site service centre.
Despite the massive scale of the place, the almost unfathomable breadth of products on offer and the awkward nature of shipping items as small as a volume pot or as large as an 8×10 cab, Hans proudly tells us that, on average, it takes just 18 minutes from the factory receiving the order until it’s picked, packed and on a truck heading for one of Thomann’s 12 million customers worldwide.
So how do they do it? Well, to store this vast array of products, you can’t just have one big room of stacked up boxes, Raiders Of The Lost Ark-style. In order to make such a massive logistical challenge, you need a lot of technology, and a lot of ingenuity, and some talented people keeping it all together.
“We have five different automatic warehouses,” Hans explains of the way the huge space is subdivided for maximum efficiency. “One automatic warehouse with 80,000 boxes, and then we have a shuttle automatic warehouse with 200,000 boxes… Logistics is always a challenge.”
Robot Rock
Robots scour massive rows of shelves stacked with guitars, amps, and other music gear.
A challenge it may be, but seeing it all in action is a remarkable feat. One of the so-called ‘Twister’ automatic warehouses looks like something out of a science fiction film – row after row of tightly packed shelves several stories tall and as long as a city block are being constantly attended by smoothly running robot pickers move up and down the rows pulling out products at dizzying speeds.
It all winds up on the 30 kilometres of conveyors that criss-cross the various sub-warehouses, eventually wheeling their way to where the products are either packed up by one of Thomann’s human employees or, if necessary, put straight onto one of the rows of trucks stood ready to depart at any given time.
The temptation is to look at all this and assume that the secret of Thomann’s success is the warehouse, or the robots, or the miles and miles of conveyors carrying boxes around the place. But to hear Hans speak, the most important thing about Thomann, and the thing that has helped the company grow from that old farmhouse to a national mail-order business in the 80s, and into the biggest player in the international online music trade. Looking after your people – inside and out.
The Human Touch
From the start, Thomann’s geography has meant that it has had to work harder to reach customers – but it was the thing that made the company perfectly suited to moving into selling products remotely. Unlike many online retailers, Thomann understands that it’s important to ensure your customer has a great experience if you want them to come back. That’s why the company employs over 200 people at its service centre – expert techs and repair professionals who ensure that Thomann’s guitars are in the best possible condition before it leaves, and deals with any issues that crop up that require a return. They can even ensure that your guitar is set-up with your preferred strings and string gauge before it gets sent out – just like an old-fashioned local guitar shop would.
This level of customer service isn’t just found after you make a purchase – across the way from the warehouse is the huge Customer Care Centre, which houses the huge team of Thomann staff from across the world who are at the end of a phone, email or live chat to help customers in a huge variety of different languages. What’s interesting about these helpful souls is that none of them are on any kind of commission, they’re just there to help. “That’s very important,” Hans insists. “Nobody stands behind and measures the revenue by time, or square metres. So if somebody needs help, let’s say for 30 minutes, with buying some headphones, it’s fine.”
Hans Thomann Jr has steered the company to becoming what it is today. (Image: Thomann)
It’s this human touch that makes the other stuff work, and sets Thomann apart from other giant retailers.
“Look,I believe Amazon is a great company if you need mainstream consumer goods,” he explains. “But if you need a great product, with a nice setup, and help from musicians… It’s not the right company to buy a €5,000 Gibson from. Retail is detail, and serving musicians is a lot of details!”
Caring about those details has helped take Thomann from a farmhouse to the world´s biggest family music store over the course of 70 years – and will keep this family business serving musicians for a long time to come.
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