Out of the ordinary in Moses Lake

Build Your Own Clone mails off guitar electronics kits

MOSES LAKE - Owning a business called Build Your Own Clone can sometimes elicit interesting reactions from people.

"On the local level, if I go to the bank or the post office and they see my credit card or what's the company, it's like, 'Whoa. What are you doing?'" says Keith Vonderhulls, owner of such a business, which goes by b.y.o.c.

"We're just a little operation, so we're obviously not going to make an impact on the economy here, but it's just something that's out of the ordinary and I think this is a pretty cool thing," Vonderhulls said.

Vonderhulls originally started the business in Aberdeen, but moved when his wife of seven years, Darcy, got a job with the Pasco School District. They moved to Othello, and in October made the move to Moses Lake to be close to her family.

"It's one of those things that was a hobby that eventually started making more money than my day job," Vonderhulls said of b.y.o.c., estimating he got his business license in about 2005. "It literally started on the kitchen table, then my wife made me build a little work bench and move down to the basement."

When looking for a place in Othello, Vonderhulls wanted to find a house with a shop, and then when moving to Moses Lake, he needed his own shop and to hire employees.

The business makes kits to build replicas of vintage guitar effects, which Vonderhulls said are no longer in production.

A guitar pedal affects the instrument's tone, explained employee David Lobie.

"A guitar pedal can give you that pretty tone, or more of a distorted tone," Lobie said. "Whatever you're after, from aggressive to beautiful. We got it all here. These pedals are in every kind of music you listen to. Guitarists are using these same type of things to make all the effects and sounds you're used to hearing in the music you like."

If one were to buy an original, Vonderhulls said, it would end up costing quite a bit of money, whereas the company makes a replica for less than $100.

"But it's a kit, so you have to build it yourself," he said.

Vonderhulls had always been into tinkering with electronics, specifically for guitars.

"It's a very popular thing right now with guitarists in particular, to have handmade boutique effects, amplifiers, pedals and even guitars now," he said. "They're very expensive to have someone hand make the stuff. Some of these things were so simple, people were spending upwards of $300 for replicas of these Fuzz Face pedals and it's literally two transistors, four resistors and three capacitors."

Vonderhulls thought it was so easy, if he put together a set of simple instructions, someone who had no idea what they were doing could create their own replica. So he put together 10 kits with a picture tutorial.

"It just took off from there, really quickly, through word of mouth," Vonderhulls recalled. "People were all over the Internet going, 'Hey, look at this pedal; I built it myself.' I think that's the biggest appeal of what I do, to musicians: Not so much that they can get the same thing for a fraction of the price, or even so much the sound quality as they did it themselves."

Locally, there hasn't been much response, because b.y.o.c isn't a foot traffic kind of store, Vonderhulls said. Nor does he want people showing up knocking on the door, since he's licensed for Internet operations.

The company is worldwide, with distributors in the United Kingdom, the European Union, Singapore, Australia and Canada.

"They've set up their distributors and they've set up dealer networks that I don't even know half of the people that they go to," Vonderhulls said. "Sometimes I get e-mails that say, 'I have a guitar shop out here in Finland and I'm a dealer for your product and I have a faulty part,' and I say, 'Oh, I've never heard of you.'"

Because of the move from Othello, Vonderhulls put distributor orders on hold for about three months, which means he's got a large amount of orders right now. It's hard to determine an average because of the rapid growth, he says, but his goal is to send out 1,000 units per month.

"Right now we're exceeding that, but that will probably slow down pretty soon as the distributors get caught back up," he said.

The business employs two people other than Vonderhulls himself.

Born and raised in Moses Lake, Lobie is one of those employees.

"I think it's very exciting, he's going back to the old school with a lot of these pedals, a lot of the tones," he said. "A lot of this stuff is stuff Jimi Hendrix was actually using, and this is just beautiful, beautiful guitar effects. I think the sky's the limit with these."

b.y.o.c is almost done with its effects line and is getting into amplifiers, Vonderhulls said.

"I consider it a success now, to do this full time and support my family," he said. "It's something I enjoy doing, so in those terms it's already a success. I don't see myself ever saying, 'OK, I'm done, I'm not going to try to make anything new anymore. 'I'm not going to stop trying to grow the company."

For more information, access the company Web site at www.buildyourownclone.com.