Bax Music Brand Guidelines: Two Brothers in Goes, an Equalizer Logo & a 2025 Restart

Two brothers, a DJ sideline and Goes.

Bax Music started with two brothers from Zeeland, in the south-west of the Netherlands. Jochanan and Nathanael Bax earned pocket money as DJs at campsites, weddings and company parties and began renting out DJ, lighting and sound equipment, RTL Nieuws recounted in April 2025. They formally founded the business in 2003, working from a small floor above a shop in Goes; NOS also gives 2003 and the two brothers as founders.

At first the rental and sale of equipment ran through listing sites such as Speurders and eBay. About two years later the brothers had their own web shop built, selling equipment and later musical instruments, RTL Nieuws reported. The business traded for years as Bax-shop. In 2008 it won an FD Gazelle, an award for fast-growing companies, and in 2012 it opened a large showroom in Goes: RTL Nieuws described sixteen hundred square metres of guitars, pianos, drum kits and amplifiers. In 2013 the investment arm of Rabobank became a shareholder.

Belgium came next. In August 2014 Jochanan Bax told the e-commerce magazine Twinkle that Bax-shop had taken over a music shop in Antwerp that had gone bankrupt, including its fittings, keeping it open from 27 June 2014 ahead of an official reopening as Bax-shop that September. The same interview said dedicated French and German web shops had opened that year, with all orders still shipped from the warehouse in Goes.

An equalizer in the logo.

The name changed in June 2016. Ecommerce News reported on 2 June 2016 that Bax-shop had changed its corporate identity that week and would continue, at home and abroad, as Bax Music; the American trade magazine MMR carried the change later that month. The new mark paired the name with a stylised equalizer. “With the name Bax Music and the equalizer we literally add more music to our branding,” Jochanan Bax told Ecommerce News, adding that an equalizer amplifies music and gives it more colour. The web addresses kept the old name: the Italian store opened that month at bax-shop.it, the seventh of the company’s European web shops after the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain.

The same report said the shops were written by native-speaking copywriters and translators in-house, often musicians themselves, and that customer service for each country was answered from Goes by speakers of that country’s language. The company then had more than four hundred staff, according to the report, with every order shipped from its headquarters in Goes.

Shops were part of the identity too. Twinkle reported in June 2016 that a seven-hundred-square-metre store, the Amsterdam Bax Experience on Nobelweg, would open the following month; the company described a full keyboard department, a soundproof drum area, a guitar department with two soundproof practice rooms and a workshop where guitars are built and repaired. RTL Nieuws listed large stores in Rotterdam and Amsterdam from 2016, alongside Goes and Antwerp. In summer 2019 Bax Music took over the Apeldoorn store of Key Music, a rival chain that had gone bankrupt; in 2022 it opened a second Belgian store, in Bruges; and in early 2024 the Amsterdam store moved to premises more than three times larger, followed in May 2024 by a new, larger warehouse in Goes.

Guitar walls and catalogue pages.

Musical-instrument retailers often present themselves through places as much as products. Guitar Center’s Sunset Boulevard store in Los Angeles hosts Hollywood’s RockWalk, a hall of fame begun in 1985 in which musicians’ handprints are set in cement, and Sweetwater has built a campus in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with a retail store, recording studios and a performance theatre, according to English Wikipedia. Guitar Center’s website groups its stock by department: guitars, amplifiers and effects, keyboards, drums and recording gear.

Names in the trade tend to be plain. Guitar Center took its name in the late 1960s after starting as The Organ Center and then The Vox Center, and its group includes Musician’s Friend, Music & Arts and Woodwind & Brasswind, names that state the trade directly. Retailers also commission their own lines: in January 2025 Guitar World reported a set of three pedals made by Keeley Electronics as Sweetwater exclusives, and in 2026 the magazine reported Guitar Center’s plan for an in-house guitar brand developed with customer input.

Corporate histories in this trade usually begin with one person: a musician recording bands from a Volkswagen bus in 1979, as CNN Business reported of Sweetwater’s Chuck Surack, or an organ seller in Hollywood in 1959, as English Wikipedia says of Guitar Center’s Wayne Mitchell. Later chapters often involve investors, with private equity firms investing in both companies, and in Guitar Center’s case a Chapter 11 reorganisation in 2020.

The trade has also contracted. In August 2025 Guitar World reported, in an article on the pressure that online selling puts on physical shops, that Sam Ash had closed all of its stores the previous year. This guide sets out what can be checked about each retailer — founders, owners, stores and own-brand lines — and attributes each claim to the source that makes it.

Bankruptcy and a restart in 2025.

The growth did not last unbroken. On 1 April 2025 a Dutch court declared Bax Music bankrupt, a week after the company had applied for a suspension of payments, NOS reported. The broadcaster described it as one of the largest stores for musical instruments and equipment in Europe, with about three hundred staff and, besides the web shop, six stores in the Netherlands and Belgium. It cited longer-running financial problems, including a debt to the Dutch tax authority, and said a restructuring plan had not gone ahead because of a disagreement among the shareholders.

A restart followed within weeks. On 2 May 2025 Omroep Zeeland reported that co-founder Jochanan Bax and the investor Stijn Bakkeren were taking over the bankrupt business, with the aim of keeping about eighty per cent of the staff; RTL Nieuws reported days later that the two had set up a new company for the purpose. RetailDetail reported on 19 May 2025 that the stores in Amsterdam, Apeldoorn and Goes had reopened that afternoon, that the web shop would follow that Wednesday, that Antwerp was likely to reopen in June, and that the future of the Rotterdam store depended on talks with its landlord. The trade site called the chain one of the larger European players in its field.

Bax Music’s colours and typeface are not documented in the sources used here, so the palette below is our own. What the record does show is a brand built in two layers: a plain web-shop name, Bax-shop, that still sits in the web addresses, and a 2016 name and equalizer mark meant, in the founder’s words, to add more music to the branding.

For a design guide, Bax Music shows how a retailer can rename itself around a single graphic idea while its web addresses keep the older name. Compare Kytary, a Czech instrument retailer that also grew from a web shop into large stores, and Thomann, the German instrument retailer. For this guide we use teal, amber and mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bax Music’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.