Harmony

Harmony (Sears and Roebuck)
The Harmony Company was founded in 1892 by Wilhelm Schultz, (a former employee of Lyon & Healy)

In 1916, The Harmony Company was bought by the large Chicago based mail order firm Sears, Roebuck and Co., who had a plan to corner the Ukulele market. This never really came about but The Harmony Company went on to become the largest producer of stringed instruments in the US, selling some 250,000 pieces in 1923 and 500,000 in 1930, including all kinds of Guitars, Banjos, and Mandolins as well as Ukuleles

In the late 1930s Harmony bought the brand names La Scala, Stella, and Sovereign from the bankrupt Oscar Schmidt Co. to add to the Harmony and Sears brand names, Harmony, Playtime, Silvertone, Supertone, Monterey, the Prep, Vogue, Valencia, Vagabond and Wings. There were also endorses like Johnny Marvin and Roy Smeck whose names were used to brand instruments, plus there was also a lot of largely unbranded instruments sold through the Sears Roebuck catalogue.

As well as distributing their own brands they made instruments for a lot of the big US distributors like P'IMCo and Metropolitan Music Co.

The Harmony Company hit a post war peak in 1964-1965, selling 350,000 instruments, but far eastern competition led to the company’s demise 10 years later. Between 1945 and 1975, Harmony had mass produced about ten million guitars, but finally even though in 1954 they had taken over Regal, their biggest rival up to that point, they were no longer competitive with the Far East. It is likely that before the closure of the Chicago factory, some of the final Harmony branded products, particularly the lower end ones, were produced in the Far East rather than Chicago.

Sears, Roebuck and Co. continued on after the demise of Harmony and are still going today. For a while after the Harmony factory had gone they had Japanese or Taiwanese import Ukuleles branded Harmony and later just Sears Roebuck. From certainly the 1980's on they no longer branded instruments themselves and just sold other peoples instruments in their catalogue.

In 2015, with a resurgence in interest of the old brand names on electric Guitars and the resurgence of Ukuleles in general they reintroduced the Slvertone name again for use on Chinese made Guitars and Soprano Ukuleles

While they were still in business in Chicago Harmony made Soprano, Concert and Baritone scale Ukuleles. Though they claimed to make Tenor Ukuleles they stuck rigidly to the Standard Approved specifications so their Tenors were all really only Concert size

Harmony was the first company to start using plastic fretboards for their Soprano Ukuleles This started, along with the the distinctive "Sharks Tooth" tuners, in the 50's as a result of the success of the plastic '''Ukulele. Harmony also tried to market their own fully plastic Ukulele, the Modern Bali''' but it was not a great success.

Another "innovation" Harmony tried in the late 20's was an aeroplane shaped bridge design they called the "Aero bridge" and claimed it protected Guitars against the soundboard sagging, or "bellying", at the bridge? It was more likely just a gimmick though, along with their Wings range of Ukuleles, for the popular period of Charles Lindbergh and pioneering aviation in the late 1920's. As an example of this it was a feature on the first Johnny Marvin Professional Tenors, but was phased out for a more normal bridge in the 1932, well before the end of production.

In the mid 1960's Harmony produced a special, low cost, "Classmate" Soprano for use in Chicago schools music programmes. This idea for the Ukulele as an educational tool caught on for a while and was taken up in a lot of other US cities and with a number of other makers.

The Harmony brand name is now owned by a Singapore company called BandLab Technologies and since 2018 they have been selling Harmony branded electric Guitars and amplifiers