TCL SPECIAL ORDER IMPORTS
About Us
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        In the summer 1990, Tom Conner the president of TCL Special Order Imports was sitting in the office of LINE Music GmbH in Hamburg Germany. Initially, he had gone there to resolve some royalty disputes regarding Mitch Ryder with whom he had produced several albums and ended up with a distribution deal for North America for Line's entire catalog of 800 titles.

         Upon his return to the states Conner established  TCL Special Order Imports as a subsidiary of  TCL Communications, Inc and began acting as a "special order department" for independent record retailers whose customers were looking for obscure titles. As the word got out and retailers began asking for titles not in Line Music's catalog, Conner hooked up with several European distributors and gained access to practically every title in print along with a computerized ordering system to instantly find and order titles on an hourly basis. The void was quickly filled. Stores could order the titles one at a time without having to meet any minimum quantity requirements normally imposed by large distributors.

        By 1995 the small company had built a network of 175 independent record stores that were ordering "hard to find" titles daily. It remains the same today although the number independent record stores is shrinking as they are gradually being driven out of business by the big box retailers.

       That same year ('95), TCL launched a retail website   www.tclimports.com  open to retail customers where everything is listed in alphabetical order. The approximately 360,000 active titles in their database are replaced every 30 days with farm fresh data. There is no shopping cart but you can place an order on the e-mail order form or call their 800 number to ask a question or place an order. Just try finding a phone number on any of the big retail sites. There are also no disturbing banner ads or pop ups or unders. This low tech approach grew out of necessity rather than design. When Conner was quoted prices ranging from $10,000 to $100,00.00 to develop a website by so called "professionals" he enlisted the help of some neighborhood amateurs and a free web design package from AOL called AOL Press.

         A recent survey by TCL of sites such as Amazon.com and Borders.com revealed that these behemoths only have about 30% of the depth of catalog that TCL carries on it's website. Their findings were based on real life information, "We had about 350 titles laying around in our back room that had accumulated over the years and decided to look them up on Amazon. About 70 out of the 350 were listed on the Amazon site. That leaves an awful lot of titles not covered.", Conner said. "As a result of the survey, we discovered titles Amazon listed that were consistently out of stock and had buyers waiting so we listed them on Amazon's Marketplace and it's worked out very well for us. "

         In the past, such notables as NPR have used TCL to obtain hard to find items used in their programming but unobtainable at the corner mega-store. TCL's customer base ranges from kids looking for the newest German metal vinyl LPs to the classical music lover searching for recordings by obscure composers like Karl Stockhausen.

         TCL also operates All Christmas Music.com www.allchristmasmusic.com  a website that specializes in Christmas music imported from other countries .

          TCL Communications, Inc. also operates www.allsportsvideos.com a producer of sports oriented music videos for high schools and individual athletes.