![]() ![]() Pastorius found his old friend looking to upgrade his Internet presence. He moved back to Minnesota from California in 2002, having done some consulting to help "storefronts get out of the Dark Ages" with regard to the Internet. Pastorius, also 51, had built a career in sales and marketing in the software industry. It looks like the kind of neighborhood music shop vanishing from cities across the country.Īnd had Mahler not brought his old friend on board to help modernize the business plan, his store may have joined that club. There is no place for the 51-year-old Mahler to sit, except at his workbench in the back of the store, where he uses wooden blocks to tune accordion reeds and matches a stockpile of obscure parts with instrument brands he is seeing for the first time. A not-quite-soundproofed practice room fills the shop with sounds of beginners learning to navigate the instrument's keys and bellows. ![]() Its walls are lined with accordions new and old. There's nothing about the store that would suggest it's the brick-and-mortar home of a thriving online business. " the Internet was one of the smartest moves I made." "There was a point I was ready to give up," Mahler said. Mahler has also kept the store going thanks to his fanatical collecting of old accordion parts for future repairs and the success of his self-designed, Italian-manufactured accordion line. The store's companion site,, turns 50,000 hits a month and that's helped push Mahler Music's yearly revenues to $250,000 and give the business a second market. Mahler Music Center, a 25-year-old bandbox of an accordion shop on Raymond Avenue, is enjoying new life as one of the nation's preeminent online accordion dealers, thanks to a makeover Pastorius gave his buddy's business. Now, it has turned the lifelong friends into co-workers. ![]() Paul's West 7th Street neighborhood.īut the sound of that accordion kept a link between them as they went to different high schools and pursued disparate career paths. As kids, Bruce Pastorius and Ken Mahler made an odd pair: Mahler, the quiet kid who dutifully practiced his accordion 45 minutes every day as his excitable friend from parochial school impatiently waited to go play in the streets of St. ![]()
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