It saddens us that we are heading into a second lockdown in the UK, when we know how much our clients, friends, families, businesses and musicians have already suffered due to this virus. Throughout this pandemic, we have done all we can to keep our contacts safe, while still offering our services and helping you lovely folk to keep making music. We will continue to do so during Lockdown 2.0.
Limits on visitors
As a non-essential retail business, from Thursday 5 November we are unable to welcome visitors into our workshop until at least Wednesday 2 December. However, as we have only ever operated on an appointment-only basis, this is not a big change for us. Our online store, featuring our high-quality handmade guitars and a small selection of awesome refurbished instruments, will remain in operation. We will also keep operating our custom shop, both for current work and new commissions.
Workshop services remain available
We are in the fortunate position of being able to keep providing our workshop services to our amazing customers - you’ve been brilliant in supporting Malone Guitars throughout 2020 and we want to keep supporting you too.
Booking and drop off
If you need our guitar repair or setup services, please call us first on 07803 043877. We will discuss a convenient time for you to bring your guitar to us (you may of course post your guitar to us, or arrange a courier to do this for you, at your own risk). All pickup and drop off bookings are at least 30 minutes apart: this is to ensure we have time to clean anything that needs to be cleaned, and to help keep to the guidance, which limits individuals meeting from different households to a maximum of two at any time. We ask you to call again on arrival and leave your guitar in our secure drop off space, at the entrance to our premises. We will then immediately collect your guitar, observing appropriate social distancing, and take it into our workshop. We will wear a face covering and ask that you do so too.
Once in the workshop, wearing disposable gloves, we will sanitise your guitar using appropriate cleaning products before beginning any work. In some cases, particularly where the instrument is made from sensitive materials or incorporates delicate finishes, it may not be possible to sanitise your guitar in this way - if so, we will move it to ‘quarantine’ for a minimum of 72 hours before starting work.
All guitars will be deep cleaned and sanitised again before being returned to their case/bag.
Collection and payment
Once we have completed our work, we will text or call you to let you know and to arrange a convenient time for collection. We will then send you a text message containing an online payment link using our iZettle system, so that you can pay safely before collecting. If you would prefer to pay by bank transfer, please let us know.
The collection procedure is essentially the reverse of drop off - call when you arrive and we will leave your guitar in our safe area, from where you may collect it contact-free.
NHS and Keyworkers
Weirdly, the Malone Guitars family includes a higher-than-normal number of key workers - doctors, teachers, nurses, trades people and the like. We know as much as anyone how hard 2020 has been for you. So, from now until the end of this year, we would like to offer all key workers a 10% discount on all our workshop services. If you qualify, please let us know when booking drop off and the discount will be applied at the time payment.
We appreciate all of this makes things more difficult, but we don’t know how else to do it. We will really miss having our clients and friends around, the incredible stories of crazy gigs, cool guitars and famous friends, the impromptu jam sessions. Hopefully we can get back to a more-normal ‘normal’ soon, but in the meantime keep your heads up and keep making music!
