Maureen Wallenfang
Appleton Post-Crescent
Published 8:20 AM EST Dec 6, 2019
Jim Laabs Music is a name that music lovers may remember from Appleton’s past.
The music store returns Saturday, bringing its new, used and rental pianos, guitars and band instruments to a Fox River Mall space next to the former Younkers.
“We felt a need there. We’ve been getting a lot of people coming over from the Fox Valley to our Stevens Point store,” said Jim Laabs, now 83, in a call from the Stevens Point store he opened in 1958.
“The majority of our business is done online, but it’s not totally that way. Having a brick-and-mortar store is another way of meeting people and showing them what we have,” he said. “We’ll get good traffic and exposure in the mall. We have a smaller store to keep our overhead down so it doesn’t get out of hand.”
Jim Laabs Music stores had been all over Wisconsin — in Appleton, Green Bay, Madison, Janesville, Eau Claire, Fond du Lac and Stevens Point — for decades. They sold pianos, organs, band and string instruments, drums, guitars and accordions.
The last Appleton location, a massive 8,000-square-foot store, closed in 2001 on College Avenue. Its space is the present day ground floor of the Building for Kids Children’s Museum.
The Fox River Mall Jim Laabs Music store can be reached at 715-684-9479.
Contact Maureen Wallenfang at 920-993-7116 or [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter at @wallenfang.
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