Tom Lee Music Brand Guidelines: The Hong Kong Music Store Founded in Kowloon in 1953

Thomas and Betty Lee’s music shop.

Tom Lee Music, known in Chinese as 通利琴行, was founded in Hong Kong in 1953, the company’s website says, adding that it now has more than 70 years of history. English Wikipedia names the founder as Thomas T. V. Lee. The NAMM Oral History programme, which interviewed him in November 2011, lists him as co-founder, says the stores were established with Betty Lee, and says his name had been linked with music in Hong Kong since the early 1950s.

The first shop was in Tsim Sha Tsui, on the Kowloon side of the harbour. Writing on the Irish music site CLUAS in June 2009, a visiting journalist said the company’s Cameron Street store in Tsim Sha Tsui had opened in 1953, “wedged in among the dim sum restaurants,” and described its bilingual signage in English and Cantonese and the collectors’ guitars framed and mounted on its walls. The company today names its flagship on Cameron Lane in Tsim Sha Tsui and calls it one of the largest music specialist stores in Southeast Asia; English Wikipedia gives its floor area as thirty thousand square feet.

A few years after opening, the shop gained the agency that still shapes it. In 1960 Tom Lee Music became the exclusive distributor of Yamaha musical instruments and audio equipment in Hong Kong, English Wikipedia says, and the company runs the Yamaha Music Program among its lessons. Its website lists Yamaha with Steinway & Sons, Bösendorfer and Petrof among the piano brands it sells, and the company says it holds exclusive agencies for instrument brands across pianos, digital keyboards, orchestral instruments, percussion, guitars, amplifiers and audio.

Stores, lessons, repairs and a foundation.

The business grew into a chain across Hong Kong. The CLUAS article counted 20 outlets across Hong Kong in 2009, with the Tsim Sha Tsui store and one other serving as showrooms, and a shop in Macau; English Wikipedia, in an undated passage, gives 15 stores in Hong Kong and one in Macau. The company’s own store finder sorts its shops into flagship stores, regional stores and smaller Tom Lee Music Express stores across Kowloon, Hong Kong Island, the New Territories and Macau, with separate service sections for guitars and orchestral instruments. By 2011, the NAMM entry said, the business had expanded into professional audio and instrument wholesale and retail in Hong Kong, China and Canada.

Selling is only part of the offer. The company says it provides after-sales maintenance and repair, and runs a music arts centre to promote music education and bring music into the community. Its website lists piano tuning, a guitar service department, an orchestral instrument service and an electronic and pro-audio repair department, and links to the Tom Lee Academy for lessons. English Wikipedia describes Tom Lee Engineering as a wholly owned subsidiary; the website lists it alongside a recording studio and an events arm called TomLee Live.

The founders also set up a charity. The Tom Lee Music Foundation, a non-profit body that promotes music through education and public events, was formed in 1977 according to English Wikipedia; the NAMM entry dates the Lees’ music foundation to 1967. English Wikipedia lists annual events run by the company in Hong Kong, among them the Yamaha Asian Beat band competition, the Soundbase acoustic band competition and piano competitions, as well as instrument workshops.

Signs, shops and owners.

Musical-instrument retailers present themselves through a small set of public elements: a shop sign and logo, a colour scheme carried from the storefront to the web shop and the delivery box, and the words they use for their stores and services. This series looks at chains and single large stores in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Slovakia, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore, and describes each identity only as the company publishes it or as a dated source records it. Where a company does not publish its colours or typefaces, the palette in each guide is an unofficial interpretation.

Store formats differ widely. Some retailers run one very large store beside a central warehouse: German sources describe Music Store in Cologne and Musikhaus Kirstein in Schongau this way, each with a single store and a large logistics site. Others run chains of city shops across a country or a region, and the guide for each company sets out its own store count only as a dated source gives it.

Services sit alongside the sales floor. Some of these companies describe music schools, lessons or repair workshops as services they offer; Music Store founded its Rock School in 1992, German Wikipedia says, and lists a repair workshop among its services. Events play a part too: Musikhaus Kirstein has held its own house fair, MusiConnect, since its 30th anniversary in 2017.

Online shops now sit next to physical stores, and corporate pages tell the story of founders and owners, from a musician opening a small shop to a second generation joining the management. Each guide that follows separates what the company says about itself from what independent, dated sources document, and names those sources at the end.

A separate company in Vancouver since 1969.

The name crossed the Pacific in 1969. English Wikipedia says Tom Lee Music Canada was incorporated that year and operates independently of the Asian business, with its head office in Vancouver. The Canadian company says it began as a small piano retailer in Vancouver and now trades from five retail locations and an online store in British Columbia, plus four Steinway Piano Gallery stores in Calgary, Ottawa, Markham and Mississauga. Its Megastore on Granville Street, the company says, fills 90,000 square feet over five floors of a renovated heritage building that once held a furniture store, a bowling alley and a piano store. It calls itself one of the largest full-line musical instrument retailers in North America; that is its own description. In 2009 CLUAS counted nine Canadian stores, built out from the Vancouver showroom.

Both companies present the name plainly, in two languages. The Hong Kong website closes with the slogan “THINK MUSIC．THINK TOM LEE” and a Chinese line that translates roughly as “with Tom Lee, music is more complete,” while the Canadian website carries a Chinese-language section for its customers. The Hong Kong company says its retail business spans both sides of the Pacific, in Hong Kong, Macau and Canada.

For a design guide, Tom Lee Music shows how one shop name can carry a piano agency, a chain of stores, a school and a foundation across two continents. Compare Parsons Music, another Hong Kong music retailer, and Yamaha, the maker whose instruments the company has distributed in Hong Kong since 1960, according to English Wikipedia. For this guide we use a deep navy, a brass gold and a piano ivory with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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