Gustard - who are they?
The other week I was heading down to Shenzhen for a business trip. I had asked Mr. Huang, the business manager and co-founder of Gustard to meet me for a chat, and he had agreed to meet me at my hotel. In the morning I got a call from Mr. Huang that they had arrived, so I walked down to see two young men maybe around the age of 30 waving at me.
These two men are the founders of the company: Mr. Huang, a former officer of China’s People’s Liberation Army, and the principal engineer (who would rather not have his name posted), a self-taught engineer who used to work for a small PA systems manufacturer designing speakers and microphones.
Brought together by their common hobby, they designed their first DAC for the DIY community in China in 2009 when the high end market was still dominated by expensive foreign brands. They would build one by hand for every order, and were quickly overwhelmed by the demand when the word spread of the quality. They decided that they would need to contract a manufacturer to satisfy the demand, and Gustard was born.
Even with high demand for your product, using a contract manufacturer poses a significant monetary risk. In order to keep the price down you need to manufacture a certain number of units, and there is no guarantee you can sell them all. This is a problem that small Chinese companies face every time they release a new product – you have no means of predicting demand, and all you have is your trust in your product. Additionally, you can’t just use any manufacturer out there as high end audio products need a high level of quality control, so you may see your product launch delayed just because the capacity is taken by larger customers.
Mr. Huang tells me that they are very good in making products, but horrible at everything else. They do no marketing and can’t speak a word of English – word of mouth is all they have to help them make sales.
Despite having no experience in foreign markets, they are very interested in selling to the west, and have a plan to do so this year. They have sold DACs and amps through OEM partnerships, branded as something else, for years and have been very successful. There are also many Chinese companies that have sold their products abroad. While this has worked for them this far, Mr. Huang wants to establish the Gustard brand abroad, and also wants to make sure the foreign customers get the service they deserve.
By service, Huang means being involved with the community and handling warranty directly. They currently have zero return rate from their partners and resellers, and they suspect part of it may be due to people just not returning faulty units, either because they don’t know they have warranty or don’t know how to return the product. They want people to know that they will honor warranty for every product that says Gustard on it, no matter where you bought it.
I jokingly suggested to them that they should have an e-mail address so someone could actually contact them. Huang’s answer was: “Really? In China we usually use instant messaging”. I then realized that it’s not that I couldn’t find their email address; it’s that they don’t have one. After I explained that we foreigners are a bit backwards and still use email, they agreed that they probably should have an email address for their foreign customers.
We can expect to see a website with detailed product information in English, an official Gustard online store and an email address in the near future.
Products
I won’t go into much detail about existing products here, as there’s a lot of information on the boards already. There are six Gustard products out in the market now, with various brandings. These are:
· - U12
· - DAC-X8 USB
· - DAC-X9 USB
· - DAC-X10
· - DAC-X12
· - DAC-X12 USB
· - H10
The chips they’ve used or built prototypes with include CS4398, PCM1792 / PCM1794, AD1853 / AD1955, WM8740 / WM8741 and ESS9016 / ESS9018. They are particularly fond of ESS9018 and it has been their chip of choice from X10 onwards.
Their most successful product is U12, which is the best seller to this day. X8 and X9 are good examples of Gustard products being rebranded and sold in the west. Going OEM is a great way to minimize risk from manufacturing as you could have a batch made and sell it immediately, and another company would carry the risk of it gathering dust in a warehouse. However, this goes against Gustard’s philosophy of selling high-end products with affordable prices, as their partners have a tendency to mark the prices up quite a bit.
There are three products coming up:
· - DAC-X20 (May-June 2015). ESS9018 for each channel, a big and heavy piece of equipment which I’m still waiting for a permission to publish specs for. The initial batch will be only 200 units, and the price will be very attractive – another piece of information I want to share but haven’t gotten a permission just yet
· - A balanced amp (Q3-Q4 2015). An amp to pair with DAC-X20, I haven’t seen it or seen the specs. Only think Mr. Huang told me about it was that it is aimed at quality instead of raw power. Can probably still drive HE6 but not with insane volumes
· - An amp for HE6 and other power-hungry headphones. They have a design for this, but it may or may not see production. Very large and heavy, shipping overseas would be costly and that’s where the target audience is for something like this
I don’t want to wait for a website or an email address! How can I…
...contact Gustard?
You’ll need to open up taobao.com, go to their store page and add Mr. Huang to your Aliwawa. Yes, “huang_cs” is him. If you have no idea what any of that means, it will be difficult – it’s all in Chinese and they only speak Chinese. I’d be happy to help though, and I’ve already received PM’s and other requests on this thread and I will continue to help getting everyone the information they are after
...get review samples?
Gustard is a small company with low profit margins, so they are not jumping on the opportunity to send out kits for review. They said they would consider lending their test units to reviewers if they could be trusted to send them to the next reviewer or back to them. There is only one X20 in existence right now so for those who want one ahead of production are out of luck unfortunately
…get U12 schematics?
They haven’t decided if they can publish those. U12 continues to be one of their top sellers. If it was obsolete it’d be an easier decision. You may need to wait until they have their website and email up so you can direct your questions to them directly.
…make sure I get an X20 from the first batch?
Either talk to Mr. Huang on Aliwawa or send me PM, I’ll hook you up
Thanks
I’d like to thank Gustard for meeting me for a chat, buying me lunch, and most of all trusting me.
It was difficult to persuade Mr. Huang to allow me to even post the pics of the X20 since he thought they look ugly, not being taken by a pro photographer or having been photoshopped, not to mention publishing specs or pricing ahead of launch which I’m still trying to persuade him to let me do. He was not easily convinced that introducing the company would be a good idea either – after all, they are small, and Chinese consumers don’t trust small companies. But he believed me when I said that the western consumer appreciates transparency and honesty over brand recognition and pretty pictures, so that’s what we got.
