Concertina Connection info (from W. Wakker)

[Daniel Hersh]

After seeing things in various places speculating on the status of Concertina Connection/Wakker Concertinas, I emailed the owner William "Wim" Wakker and got the following info, which I thought was interesting enough to share here (with his permission).

 

He wrote:

"We're still active, and by far the largest concertina manufacturer worldwide. We just past 17,000 instruments that we designed, built, and sold either directly to customers, or through one of our dealers in the US, Europe, and UK.
We build 34 different concertina models in all 3 layouts: English, Duet (Wicki/Hayden, and other systems), and anglos.
We build hybrid concertinas ranging in price from $469 to $3800, traditional Wakker concertina models ranging from $7000-10,000, and our Parnassus models, starting around $10,000, and $38,000 for a consort.

Our current lead times:
Entry level models (Jackie/Jack, Elise, Rochelle): always in stock, either directly from  us or from our dealers.
Intermediate models (Minstrel, Busker, Troubadour, Clover, Peacock, Rose): current lead time around 15 weeks.
Wakker standard models: the current lead time is 5+ years. Because of this, we TEMPORARILY closed our order book until we're back to our normal 4 year waiting list. We hope to be able to open our order book again later this year (2025).
Parnassus  models: Because of the complexity of these instruments and the long build time, we use a different 'slot' based system. The current lead time for a Parnassus model is around 2  years.

(...)  Based on the market, anglos are between 25-35% of all the instruments we build/sell.

(...) For us our biggest challenge is still trying to keep up with demand. If we would not have TEMPORARILY closed our order book for the standard Wakker models, our waiting time would have past the 6 years easily."