Sam Ash Brand Guidelines: A 1924 Brooklyn Music Store, 48th Street and a 2024 Closure

A violinist, his wife and a shop of sheet music.

Sam Ash Music began in Brooklyn in 1924. Newsday, reporting in July 2024, said the violinist Sam Ash, born Ashkynase, and his wife Rose Dinin founded the business there in May of that year; Retail Dive gives the same couple and the same year, and says the company stayed in family hands for a century. English Wikipedia says the store was a way to turn Sam’s work as a violin teacher and as a working musician, with his own Sam Ash Orchestra, into a steady income.

The early shop sold sheet music, repaired instruments and sold phonographs, English Wikipedia says; Guitar World, in March 2024, described a store that sold sheet music and violins long before it stocked electric guitars, basses and drums. In 1944 the family moved the business to a new Brooklyn site on Utica Avenue and began to supply local school music programmes, delivering sheet music and stocking a widening range of band instruments.

The change that shaped the brand came in the 1950s. As rhythm and blues and rock and roll spread, Sam Ash added guitars from Gibson and Fender, according to English Wikipedia; Guitar World reported in March 2024 that it was only the second retailer in New York State to sell Gibson guitars. The store also opened a record department, run at first by the couple’s teenage son Paul. The founders’ sons, Jerry and Paul, went on to lead the company, and later generations of the family followed them into it.

From one Brooklyn shop to Music Row and beyond.

Growth beyond the first store came in the early 1960s. English Wikipedia dates the step to 1961, when Paul and Jerry Ash opened stores in Hempstead and Huntington on Long Island and in White Plains in Westchester County; Newsday gives the first Long Island stores as Hempstead and Huntington in the early 1960s. By 1990 there were eight Sam Ash stores in the New York area, and in 1992 the first outside it opened in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, English Wikipedia says.

Manhattan gave the chain its most visible address. In 1969 Sam Ash moved onto West 48th Street, the block known as Music Row, and by the late 1980s, after buying several struggling neighbours, it filled six storefronts with twelve entrances across nine buildings on both sides of the street, according to English Wikipedia. In 1999 it bought Manny’s Music, a long-standing Music Row shop, and kept running it under its own name and staff, English Wikipedia and Guitar World both say. In 2012, facing rising rents and redevelopment, the company moved its Manhattan flagship to West 34th Street.

The range widened with the chain. English Wikipedia lists musical instruments, recording equipment, DJ and lighting gear and professional sound among what the stores sold, from a head office in Hicksville on Long Island. The group also owned Samson Technologies, a wholesale business making speakers, microphones, bass amplifiers and guitars, Newsday reported. In July 2024 Newsday described Sam Ash as having been the largest family-owned musical instrument retailer in the United States, with 44 stores in 16 states until shortly before.

No official colour or type specification for the Sam Ash name appears in the sources used for this guide, so the palette here is our own.

How music retailers present themselves.

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.

A century-old chain closes; its name moves to Mexico.

The chain’s last year came quickly. In March 2024 Sam Ash announced it would close 18 stores, including the Manhattan flagship, Guitar World reported; the company’s statement at the time spoke of adapting to changing conditions and keeping a strong physical store footprint. On 2 May 2024 it announced instead that it would close and liquidate all remaining stores, English Wikipedia says.

On 8 May 2024 Sam Ash and its affiliates filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey, with 42 stores open, Newsday reported; Retail Dive put the figure at 42 stores in 16 states. In court documents the company pointed to heavy reliance on in-store traffic, too many locations, a collapse in store visits from 2020 and falling sales, Retail Dive reported.

At an auction on 20 June 2024, Organización Gonher, a Mexican distributor that supplies musical instruments to dealers in Mexico and runs two Gonher Music stores there, made the winning bid for most of Sam Ash’s assets, and the bankruptcy court approved the sale on 28 June, Newsday reported. According to court documents cited by Retail Dive, the assets included the Sam Ash trademarks and other intellectual property, internet domain names, social media accounts and customer data; Newsday added the e-commerce site and Samson Technologies. Gonher did not take on the shops: Newsday reported in July 2024 that the remaining 25 stores were closing that month, and that the buyer was keeping the Hicksville head office and the distribution centres in Hicksville and Tampa. Every Sam Ash store has closed; the chain ended its run as a store business in 2024.

The name continued online. English Wikipedia says the samash.com store reopened for sales in August 2024, and in March 2025 Hypebot reported that the brand had returned as an online retailer called Sam Ash Direct.

For a design guide, Sam Ash shows how a family name over a shop door can outlast the shops themselves. Compare Guitar Center, the national chain that went through its own Chapter 11 in 2020, and Sweetwater, the Indiana retailer that sells mainly online. For this guide we use brick red, black and cream with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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