When Mike Clem joined Sweetwater back over 20 years ago, the Indiana-based retailer was a $2 million a year business. Nowadays, the US retail giant is knocking on the door of $2 billion. In that time, Clem has steered Sweetwater’s evolution into America’s biggest music eCommerce brand. But despite his technical background, his love of music has driven his rise to the top of the brand.

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“I was a band geek by day, and a rock star at night!” Clem chuckles. “I’d be in smoky bars till 3am and then up in the morning playing at church. I just absorbed as much music as I possibly could.”

Clem nearly went to music college, only deciding at the last minute to pivot to his “second love” of computer science. Armed with the software skills to take advantage of the earliest days of the internet, Clem became something of a pioneer in the world of online retail.

In 2003, the Indiana native had an opportunity to “combine passions” with a job at Sweetwater. “We were building technology and figuring out how to make that experience great online,” he explains. “You know, Sweetwater.com went live in 1994. It was one of the very first websites on the internet, let alone this industry! And from day one, it was about educating, and it was about community: commerce came later.”

A huge part of why Sweetwater has become the billion-dollar behemoth it is today is their unique approach in an era where online retail is about as impersonal as it gets. Every customer gets assigned a “Sales Engineer”: a highly trained and knowledgeable customer service representative who will remain their permanent point of contact at the company. It’s a level of personalised service that comes straight from Sweetwater founder Chuck Surack.

“There’s definitely a love of the game here,” Clem explains. “We’re in it for more than just the business part. Music is a high-passion industry, and success is moving you along that musical journey. And so that’s why this relationship model pays off. We’re picking up the phone, saying, ‘Hey, tell me about your goals. Where are you trying to get to?’ And then we can be a companion along that journey. We’re actually understanding customers at a personal level – it’s not just transactional and through a spreadsheet.”

Another part of Sweetwater’s success has been a different approach to growth – “Chuck was smart enough to say there,” Clem says, “there’s such a thing as growing a company too quickly.” The company, which was founded 1979, has intentionally ensured it didn’t grow too fast or expand too hastily at the expense of that customer-centric focus.

“It’s easy to get one customer experience right. It’s hard to do that consistently across 14 million,” Clem freely admits. “It requires you to create structure, to create culture. We have to hire the right people that come in with a mindset to serve others. There’s a culture of obsessing over details like I’ve never seen in any other company. No detail is too small.”

For Clem, there’s something unique and special about music makers that makes this approach even more effective.

“Y’know, music resonates with our souls and in ways we can’t understand,” he explains. “Those moments when you get goose bumps on the arm. Nothing can ever replace that core human feeling.”

After decades working on Sweetwater’s multifaceted digital offering, Clem took over from Surack as the CEO/President of the brand in 2023. But rather than try to put his own stamp on the brand, Clem has proven passionate about preserving their founder’s core values and ethos above all else.

“Part of my promise to Chuck was to maintain the heart of the company, not the growth,” Clem explains. “Chuck would always say, we just take care of one customer at a time, one detail at a time. If we come in every day and do that with passion and precision, the growth will follow, the money will follow, but we stay focused on the customers.”

Instead of pursuing growth for growth’s sake, Sweetwater is instead focused on doing things that benefit all musicians and music lovers.

“That’s really the north star at Sweetwater: how do we grow the entire industry?” he reveals. “It’s not about growing the company or sales or profits. It’s about how we introduce a new generation to the joy of making music.”