JHS revived the ROSS Pedals line in August 2023 and dropped a whole documentary on Charles “Bud” Ross and ROSS Electronics alongside the release. Sadly, the revival didn’t go as planned and JHS will be shutting down the line just over one year later.
According to JHS’ own Josh Scott in a lengthy video, the ROSS revival initially went well. JHS sold 4,500 ROSS pedals at launch, and by the end of 2023 has sold 5,400 in total. Then from January 2024 until present day, JHS sold a whopping 334 pedals… which isn’t great.
The good news is that the ROSS shutdown isn’t affecting anyone’s job at JHS. There are still some ROSS pedals available over at JHS’ website, which will surely go for like $2,000 in five years on Reverb.
“We’re shutting the Ross division down,” said Scott. “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 revival] 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.'”
