Our Com­pany His­tory

In 1954, Hans Thomann Senior decided to quit his job as a travelling musician (including with the circus, see picture) and set up his own music business. On the side, he continued to look after the family farm and travelled almost daily to Würzburg, 70 kilometres away, to study the trumpet.

Over the years, more and more of the Thomann farm's living quarters were converted into exhibition and sales areas. And Hans Thomann Senior had already made a name for himself. The product range grew steadily: it was the glorious time of organs, guitars and the first synthesizers. As a young boy, Hans Thomann Junior was already allowed to work in the shop and make his first deals.

This is what the shop looked like in the late 80s - very well-arranged and modest. The barn was both the lighting department and the box store. The former children's room became the accounts department. On the left of the picture is the Thomann family home. It was demolished in 2023 to make room for the gradual expansion of the shop.

After 36 years as business owner, Hans Thomann Senior retired from the company. He was replaced by the eldest son, Hans Thomann Junior, who still runs the company today.

Just two years later, Hans Thomann launches the "Hot Deals". The first advertising brochures (approx. 10,000 copies, mainly distributed in the region) contained almost 100 articles without pictures. Later, the pictures were simply cut out of the manufacturer's brochures and the texts were collected by the printers personally from Treppendorf on handwritten scraps of paper.

In 1996, we were the first music retailer in Germany to launch our own website. At that time, orders could be sent to us by e-mail. Initially, they were printed out, taken to the individual departments and answered by post. In the meantime, this would probably be somewhat impractical with over hundreds of thousands of emails per day.

One year later, we took over the largest mail order company for musical instruments in Germany at the time - Roadstar. The number of customers doubled to almost 100,000.

Outsourcing has never been our thing. While other companies at the time were following the trend of outsourcing call centres to low-wage countries, we wanted our telephone advice to be available locally. We like having our colleagues around us and so the decision was quickly made to set up our future "Customer Service" department in Treppendorf. At the same time, the new large PA/lighting hall with adjoining studio and drum department was built on the site of our former neighbours. The planning and realisation of the room acoustics alone (with ambiophony) took two years.

Due to the growing demand for advice and realisation of large-scale audio and effect installations, we decided to set up a separate department for this line of business. Since then, “Audio Professionell” has been furnishing theatres, town halls, museums, concert halls, discos, cinemas and more.

The year 2003 can undoubtedly be described as the start of a veritable marathon of construction work in Treppendorf. It all began with the "logistics centre". This was followed by a container warehouse, a four-storey office building and new showrooms for our guitar, brass and string departments (2005). Shortly afterwards, the new supply warehouse was built (2006). This was followed by the completely new service building with amphitheatre (2013), another shop conversion (2014), our own restaurant "t.kitchen" (2015) and the new logistics and dispatch centre in 2017.

In order to cope with the onslaught of over two million customers from all over Europe at the time, our entire website was redeveloped from scratch and comprised over 120,000 lines of programme code in 2008. Two new data centres with a total of 160 Thomann servers ensured fail-safe operation. Since then, the website and infrastructure have been subject to constant further development by a large number of colleagues.

The "brand eins" business journal devoted the title story of its April issue to Thomann. This company portrait was commissiond on the occasion of the release of "Sucess Factors in E-Commerce", a study of e-commerce which named us the best online store based on customer surveys. We achieved top rating in several individual categories, such as website design, service, and delivery, and thus managed to overtake giants such as Amazon. The thing that makes us happiest about all this: we have the best and the most loyal customers.

As soon as the expansion of the logistics area was completed, new, fundamental plans for Thomann and Treppendorf were launched.

A stately new building was to be constructed right next to the previous administration building, with more office space, meeting rooms and room for our entire Customer Service department, with over 300 employees from around 20 different countries. After years of planning and construction, the building and parking garage were inaugurated in 2022.

We also created a new building complex for our marketing team for the production of social media content, with a total of three fully equipped video studios to meet the constantly growing demands.

The second "marathon" is rounded off by a further high-bay and forwarding warehouse, as the next gigantic extension to the existing logistics and dispatch center. But that's not all...

In 2024, Thomann celebrates its 70th anniversary - an outstanding success for the founding family and all employees. And the superlatives don't stop there.

CEO Hans Thomann is currently planning to expand the shop at the main Treppendorf site. The shop will grow from its current 5200 m² to over 10,000 m² of showroom, sales and storage space.

The work should be completed by 2026.