JHS has announced it will be discontinuing the Ross Pedals line – the legacy effects brand it resurrected only last year.
It was one of 2023’s bigger pedal stories. In August, it was announced that Josh Scott and his JHS company would be bringing back the storied stompbox firm, which had first been founded in the 1970s by Charles “Bud” Ross.
At the time of the announcement, Scott put Ross up there with the likes of Leo Fender, Paul Bigsby, and Jim Marshall as one of the guitar world’s most creative and influential entrepreneurs.
Just 15 months after the red carpet was rolled out for the revived Ross range, though, JHS has now announced it will be ceasing all production as a result of faltering demand for the legacy products.
“The Ross re-release did not go as planned,” JHS writes in the description of a newly posted YouTube video. “We loved it, the market did not.”
In the video, Scott dives deeper into the decision to pull the plug on Ross pedals, citing poor sales stats as the driving force behind the move.
“We’re shutting the Ross division down,” Scott says. “This doesn’t come with any lay-offs. This is just a product line within our company that we are gonna let go and move on from. We were able to launch Era 5 of Ross, and now it’s over… again.
“We had worked on [the Ross relaunch] for a few years. At the immediate release, we sold 4,500 units. That is good. By the end of 2023, we had sold 5,400 units. That’s decent. It was like, ‘Okay, this has some response.’
“Then, from January 2024 til now, it was a complete nosedive. We sold 334 units. There’s this crazy dilemma for me. I really love this brand, I went after it, worked really hard on it, but it plummeted.
“I started being really concerned in March. It is now November, so I’ve had this series of months constantly like, ‘What’s going on with Ross?’ After months of wrestling with that, I decided, ‘I’m going to pull it from all dealers… so I can lower the price.’
“To do that, you need to do a buy-back. I knew this would be a moment of revelation: ‘How many are on the shelves?’ When I saw the buy-back was 1,000 units that had been on the shelves, I was like, ‘Okay, the market is not interested in this line of pedals.’”
And so, this Friday (November 15) at midnight Central Standard Time, the entire Ross line will be sold at a heavily discounted rate – only around $2.50 more expensive than it costs per unit to make, according to Scott. 3,700 Ross pedals are left in the inventory – after that, they’re gone for good.
“I thought, ‘How can I end this in a way where people can enjoy what’s left and, honestly, just get them out of our hands and move on?’ Well, it costs about 76 bucks to make a Ross pedal – I’m just gonna blow them out at $79.” Currently, the Ross pedals sit at $189.
The Ross relaunch was met with much fanfare, with JHS recruiting the likes of John Mayer, Brian Wampler, and Robert Keeley for a documentary that traced the history of the brand, which went through four eras of pedals prior to the JHS revival. Now, judging by Scott’s numbers, it seems Ross is gone for good.
Head over to JHS Pedals ahead of the discount on Friday.
