Rising Stars: Meet Sean Armendariz of Los Angeles / OC

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sean Armendariz.

Hi Sean, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Our shop, Recycled Rock N Roll, started with a date at the Universal City Walk and with years of working for evil corporate companies. When my wife Arica and I were still dating, we went into a shop in Universal City walk. They had all kinds of trinkets and souvenir things, but we both saw that someone had made an electric guitar into a lamp. It was obvious to me that they had taken a perfectly good guitar and chopped it up to make a lamp out of it. It wasn’t made very well either. I thought to myself, ” I bet I could make one better and use a guitar that had been broken past the point of saving it.” Chopping up a perfectly good guitar just seemed wasteful and just wrong.
Being that I worked in a huge music store I was able to get a hold of a broken guitar pretty quickly and after a few days had made our first recycled guitar lamp.
After working in the music retail industry for several years, several years of sacrificing time with my wife and children because I believed that if I really worked hard it would pay off in the end, I came to realize that I was stuck in a job that was never going to go anywhere. I realized that I needed a back up plan and side gig just to be able to make ends meet. We couldn’t pay our rent or any of our bills on time. I had my car repossessed and had to borrow money from my parents to get it back so that I could still get to work. One afternoon on a break, I was standing out in the parking lot of the store I worked at and came up with the name of the business and the logo.
Recycled Rock and Roll started out of my garage buying broken and badly playing instruments, fixing them up and reselling them for profit. During this whole time, Arica had been building up a clothing and accessory business on eBay. We did a lot of hustling to make ends meet. And life kind of went on that way for several more years.
The best thing that happened to us was Covid. I had been working at a different music store for several years reinventing myself from a sales person into a repair tech. Things were actually going well. I was one of the most successful instrument repair tech’s and one of the highest paid commissioned people in the company. When Covid hit, everything shut down and we all went home for several weeks. When we got called back in, we found out really quickly that our hours had been cut, our commissions had been cut and the staff had been cut about by half. We were now going to have to work twice as hard to earn the same amount of money we were earning before. I found out that they way they cut my hours and my commissions were going to take more than half of my yearly income away. We would lose our cars. We would lose our house. I figured, if I was going to lose everything anyway, I might as well go out on my own and lose everything working for myself.
We re-financed our house and took a small amount of our equity to get some of the equipment together that I needed and we started looking for a space to rent and open my repair shop. Every space we saw was either too big or too small. They were all too expensive. We settled on the smallest/biggest most affordable shop in a strip mall in our neighborhood. I realized that there was going to be too much unused space if I was just doing instrument repairs, and in every repair shop I had been in, there are times when no repairs come in. It can be a lot of time just sitting around. So we decided to fill in the empty space in the shop with clothing, memorabilia, collectibles and just other things we thought were cool. We wanted to capture the vibe of all the places we had hung out at when we were growing up and all the shops we loved to go to.
There were people who called us morons. There were people who said that we had no idea what we were doing and we were going to fail. There were a lot of people I thought were friends who never came to even see our shop (and still haven’t) We took all the years and experiences we had running gigantic multi-million dollar stores for evil companies and applied it to our own little shop. The first year we were open was the scariest. We barley made enough money to keep the doors open. The next year our business doubled. The third year doubled the second year.
In December, we will be open five years. We are getting busier every day and we are finally in a position where we don’t have to worry about finances as much. I feel like I actually get to help people and make a difference in peoples lives. We get to help school bands keep their instruments working. We help parents and students get emergency repairs done quickly, sometimes on the spot and at fair affordable prices. We help people find memorabilia and gifts that add a little light to their lives. We host open mic nights once a month and give our community a free event to come perform at and hang out at. Best of all, we love going to work. We know that we get to actually help people now.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
The first year was the biggest struggle. Nobody new that our shop was open, where it was, or what it was for that matter. We brought in enough business to keep the doors open, but that was just about it. We ran up a good amount of credit card debt just trying to survive.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I spent years as a sales person and in retail/ sales management. I hired and trained sales people. I ate slept and breathed sales. I thought it was my way out of poverty. I decided early in my sales career that I wasn’t going to be the sleezy type of sales person that would say whatever they needed to do in order just to close a deal. I told people the truth. Sometimes, it lost me a sale. But I found that in the long run, it gained me real customers. They customers knew that they could trust what I was telling them. I repaired instruments as a hobby for years. When the brass and woodwind repair tech at the store I was at retired, I bought his tools and taught myself how to repair and play brass and woodwind instruments. People were coming in needing repairs and there was nobody to help them. I saw it as a chance to help people and also to make some extra money for my family. Needless to say, I took to the repair and service side of musical instruments really quickly and soon was doing more business than any of the other repair people around us. I also figured out that a lot of the repair techs around us were kind of doing the car mechanic thing. They would have customers drop off their instruments, leave them there for days and then call them and give them inflated prices for what needed to be done. There were instruments I fixed in minutes for sixty dollars that other shops had quoted them three weeks and six hundred dollars.

Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
This is the city I grew up in. Born and raised. I remember how empty it was when I was little. Citrus groves and grape vineyards for miles. It’s amazing to see how many people are here now and how much this city has grown.

I feel like the city government (state and federal government as well) could be more helpful to small business. Small business used to be the back bone of this country. Then the giant corporations started to move in and wipe out all the family owned businesses. We have a dream that small businesses will rise again. We think people have grown tired of mega-stores and their revolving door of employees. We think people would like to have places to go where they feel like they are part of a community again. The same way we used to feel in the small record stores and coffee shops we used to hang out in. We were part of a family.

Pricing:

• We have items from $1 to $500 and everything in-between

Contact Info:

• Website: https://recycledrockandroll.com
• Instagram: @recycledrockandroll
• Youtube: @recycledrockandroll