Translated material
“Raises hair and treating a prostate”: how the programmer made a business on the sale of Vargan
Is it possible to quit a programmer and start selling an exotic musical instrument? Is it possible to build a successful international business on this? What mystical abilities does the game on the Wargan open and do the Russians believe that it helps to grow hair faster? Together with Ebay, Samizdat “Batenka, you are a transformer” studies the story of a modest St. Petersburg programmer Oleg Rodnin, who knows the answers to all these questions.
The musicians have long played out-their improvisation merges together, the sounds are intertwined into something prehistoric or industrial. First, the drums are piled as if the hooves of the steppe horse, they echo flute, Kalim, bass and sultry, like summer in the desert, Vargan. Suddenly the guitar lugs - the cars are the same in the same way, while they stand in a traffic jam, and the city grows in place of the steppe. A few people gathered a little to the traditional monthly jam in the St. Petersburg Vargan store “Oberton. They look like the Mariinsky Theater orchestra, who came to visit someone relaxed: they settled on chairs, there are microphones everywhere. Against the background of musicians, only two teenagers and grandfather stand out for thirty-sorcerers. Teenagers have the appearance of people who do not care who Face and Pharaoh. The girl clung to the electrihitar: apparently, she loves metal, because she tries to label “something harder” in between, and she has a shirt with a Gothic black inscription. The guy has a flute and a haircut, like the soloists of The Who, the times of Woodstock, and on the street he wears a clearance hat. Grandfather is about sixty, he has several Kalimb, and he tries to play at once on everyone, and it sounds like a theme from the Fairy Dancing Dance - mysteriously and lugging. The walls of the store are hung with brochures with boots and two hefty posters with boulders and lake. In the middle of the room, lights from lamps run, as if at a concert in a small club or district disco. In the shade, where nothing is visible, in the farthest corner-a shock installation, behind it is 38-year-old Oleg Rodney, the founder of the store. He seems to not want to stand out, and his appearance in it gives out: a short old -fashioned haircut, a neat shirt with a short sleeve, a meek temper.
Oleg poorly remembers the meeting, which ten years ago turned his whole life. Together with a friend, he walked around Winter Petersburg and quickly realized that it was a bad idea - and they jumped out to warm up the first store, and there Oleg saw him. He is known by different names: in Tatarstan he is called the Cubes, in Italy Maranzan, in Tyu and Yakutia he is called a clamp, and in Nepal - murchunga; Dromb, Morsing or simply - Vargan. This simple musical instrument is known to a person from the dawn of the times: a thin narrow plate is pulled out of wood, bamboo, bones or metal or an arc from an iron rod, a nail or wire and a thin tongue is either cut out in the middle. It is played on it all over the planet, and in front of Oleg, the store seller pressed Vargan to his lips, beat on a small tongue and published ridiculous rattles. A few days later, the relatives returned for the Wargan, not knowing that his career as a programmer was finished and he has to become one of the main Vargan sellers in Russia.
Humanity knows its ability to turn the object of its interest and love into an absolute mania. Fans of books about Harry Potter raised money with crowdfunding and at the cost of incredible efforts in two years shot a clock film about how Tom Riddle turned into the famous dark wizard of Voldemort. The fan Taylor Swift robbed the bank and left money in the courtyard of the singer’s house to attract her attention, fans of John Lennon tore off the glasses from his statue, and the admirers of the creativity “Animation” stole panties and socks from the group. It all starts with a small one, and then one day you find yourself in a situation in which the mayor of the small English town of Chippenham in the Count of Wiltshire 69-year-old John Skreggs: Together with his colleagues, he arrived in Samara on business and systematically photographed local trams, trolley buses and buses. Mr. Scragg is very fond of public transport and seriously collects a collection of photographs of the most interesting objects. For his hobby, he hit the Samara police department, where he was interrogated for five hours in a row and accused of preparing the attack.
Oleg Rodin for a year Trinkal on his first wargan, until the trenches turned into music and he began to delve into YouTube and learn skill from others.
“I did not want to play something famous: I played the piano at a music school, there was enough that,” Oleg admits. -I just improvised rhythmically-it is easier than looking and remembering usual to-re-mi-fu-li-la-li on Vargan. Although classic parties are also. For example, Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, a composer and teacher Beethoven, wrote seven concerts for this tool.
Looking through the video behind the video, Oleg noticed that the Vargana sound differently and his own is not a very rich sound. And then he rummaged through music shops and esoteric shops for a year, but could not find anything new: the same boots as he had sold throughout St. Petersburg. And then he thought: suddenly someone else in the city cannot find a good Vargan? So the online store Oberton.P.
“The customers themselves at the store suddenly appeared,” says Oleg. He did not give any advertisement to the store at the start, but he made a detailed description to each product.
- Vargana is a specific product. If you just pile them in a supermarket, no one will buy them. But if we talk about everything thoroughly how we do this, those who interested the theme will see our own in us and go to join in the right place.
The offline store in the very center of St. Petersburg-in the yards on Gorokhovaya Street-appeared at Rodnin a few years later, as soon as he overgrown with clients. Now the store has almost seven thousand subscribers on VKontakte. The meeting-chapel quickly came to naught, because people did not unite anything except that everyone has a Vargan. But then they came up with jams, and now every month the musicians with a variety of instruments are improvised together. Sometimes concerts and representations with professional Varganists are held in the store. Some of them foreigners-for example, came a folk-performer from Estonia.
The audience here is a motley one: both hippies and deputies come.
“Many people see a secret in Vargan, unusual,” says Oleg. - They want to touch the eternal and unknown. For such people, Vargan is not a musical instrument. Many people want to relax at the expense of Vargan, relax. They think: I would have to move and sit with this thing to nature, like a Chukch at the plague, forgetting about everything in the world.
Instructions for beginners
1. Close the wars between the thumb and forefinger.
2.
Bring Vargan to your lips.
3.Gently clench the wargan body with your teeth, that is, its long part. But do not bite the tool, otherwise its tongue cannot move and there will be no sound.
4.Fix the tongue. Done, you are amazing!
For example, the 30-year-old programmer Vitaliy Obukhov first saw Vargan on TV and bought it to distract from a change of work and parting with a girl. “It was possible to sit in social networks or drink beer, but I found a good hobby,” says Vitaly. For four years, Vargan is an integral part of his life: Vitaly became interested in folk music, folklore and dances, began to ride music festivals. In the winter of 2018, Vitaliy visited the Warled Festival in Tallinn, and in the fall will fly to the Munnharpe forum in Norway. He will listen to what style the Norwegians play, because he wants to play exactly like them.
There are a lot of boiled festivals, they take place in Moscow and even in Sicily. One of the community participants, Igor Dmitriev, performed on these, he works with Oleg. “In general, there is even an international booth community. Through it, people are looking for funds and then collect music festivals, ”he says. The man has two formations - psychological and engineering, but he loves music from childhood, says that if desired, he can even turn the kitchen table into a musical instrument. Igor has been playing on Vargan from the age of 13, now he is 44. When he has his own playing technique, he got to the competition of the game on the Vargan in Oberton, found new friends and now travels with them.
Video Dmitry Solomin (29 years old) regularly goes to boiled jams. For the first time, the man heard the Vargan in one of the tracks of the airhaan folk group and decided to learn how to play it. As a result, he not only found friends, but also made a folk group. True, two years later she broke up, but Dmitry continues to play on the Wargan on his pleasure and masters new instruments - a Japanese flute, gushes and a province.
But people for whom Vargan are a way to do music are not the only ones who buys wars.
“Once a woman called the store, ordered Vargan with delivery,” says Oleg. - A comrade calls the doorbell, and she opens him with a baby in her arms and says: “Oh, it is Vargan, and we saw on TV and decided to take it. To make the hair of a small one to grow better ... ”There are a lot of fierce esoterics who want to fly away with a wargan to another world and open something there. They even look for some places of power and go there later.
The enthusiastic mystifiers were ordered in a skewer from Oleg Vargana when the program “Parallel Peace” on TV3 was released. The plot said that with the help of a boar you can travel around the worlds, transform reality and “receive information”.
“Charlatans are capable of anything for the sake of money,” Oleg says. - And I want to spread Vargan only as a musical instrument. If I see that someone went very much towards esotericics, then I’m trying to influence his eyes, but this does not really help. I try to advise such people with a good Vargan - in the hope that they bother and are interested in music, not only chakras. If a person is rushing from his favorite business, he himself understands that love of music also takes away to other worlds.
In one of the VKontakte VKontakte groups, they discuss how people try to develop palace through Vargan. The author of the discussion claims to open the chakras, playing on the Wargan. Judging by the page on VKontakte, he himself leads a group on sound therapy, meditation and expansion of consciousness.
In addition, in the city of Goryachiy Key there is a center for boiling. The description of the group states that the center has existed since 2007 and helps to treat depression. However, judging by the reviews published in the group, the doctors of this center try to treat with the help of a boar not only depression, but also urinary incontinence, as well as pain in the back and neck.
And some manufacturers of Vargan assure that their instrument treats almost all diseases - osteochondrosis, impotence, cystitis and prostatitis. The musicians who simply play on the wargan are already tired of such unproven medicine. For example, Vitaly’s sheet of Oberton also leads a group about bargans, and its admins are banned by those who place posts about the treatment of Vargan.
When Oleg Rodin was just starting, he was looking for manufacturers and masters of Varganes throughout the country - through thematic publics and forums, now they all write to him themselves. Among the suppliers there are a pair of large workshops - for example, a well -known in the circles of Varganists, the workshop of the Potkin brothers in Altai: they massively release bargans of “tolerant” quality. There are also suppliers from Vietnam with cheap wars. They say that they make their brass instruments obtained thanks to the re -melting of the sleeves of American shells of the Vietnamese War.
“Most masters are simply interesting to do something with their own hands, so they get involved in the manufacture of Vargan,” says Oleg. - They think: "The nail turned, attached the tongue - here is the Vargan." But then it turns out that this is not so. The masters are very different: someone earns on boots, someone does for the soul and in their free time. Therefore, sometimes the price that the Creator asks does not correspond to the result. There are no burgers for 10 thousand, or you can find normal for two.
The first problem with the warts became clear immediately - it is difficult to understand and remember, because many of them are similar. In addition, the confusion is introduced by masters who make bargans manually: some on the fly are changing the design or some practical properties of the tool, and someone is difficult to force to make a couple of identical bargans.
“Seriality is important for online sales,” Oleg explains. “Otherwise, too much time is going to arrange the goods on the site.” But for expensive products, we do this. I forced myself to learn the names and distinctive features of Vargan. The most difficult thing is to accurately tell the buyer about them, but we did it. And this is what became our first strongest feature - people began to use our site as an encyclopedia of Vargan.
Vargan "Star"Playing on this bargan of the workshop of D. Glazyrin is easy: you do not need to compress the case so that there is a good sound. He has a wide range, and the instrument itself is very sensitive: you will barely touch - and immediately hear its piercing sounds.
Oberton’s online sales exceed offline sales by ten times, more than half of the orders account for foreign customers. Rodnin’s boots are especially popular in the USA, Great Britain, France and Germany, where he sells with eBay, anyone can become a seller there, for registration you only need to fill out a questionnaire , create an account in PayPal and upload their goods. The irony is that most often people buy cheap bargans, but the store was created to show people something else except very simple and cheap wars, but they are still popular. Stores selling wars, which in Russia, in the world, is practically: except for Obertona.P, there is one large Vargan store in Germany, and the “one and a half” stores in Moscow. The reason is simple: the wars are not particularly in demand - and so many stores are enough for demand around the world.
From abroad they order mainly men of 20-30 years old. Someone takes a joke, someone is interested in folk music and wants to try. Musicians, sometimes, are interested in playing on notes, beginners just ask which boars to choose. Among customers are collectors. It is convenient to store warts, so it is easy to collect them, unlike piano. Collectors often come for Russian wars, because there are hundreds of different craftsmen, and there are units abroad. Therefore, you can order both serial and ordinary tools.
Now to Rodnin, especially through the online platforms, more and more beginners come, some buy Vargana by chance, not understanding what they are taking and what to do with it.
- For greater safety, we send wars in the bars, to which the elastic band is attached. And the customer from the United States wanted to return his Wargan, wrote to us: “He took off the elastic band, and some wooden part fell off from the bargan, send me normal.” In general, he took the cover for Vargan.
Mass orders from abroad come mainly from merchants. But sometimes people order about twenty pieces. This happens if they had the same Vargan all their lives, and then they found many different tools at once and decided to quench the boiled hunger. If finances allow, of course. For example, one client from Australia often orders such sets in Oberton. And now there is a huge order for bargers and cases from Malta.
From the columns accompanying musicians, something cosmic is heard. Everyone laughs awkwardly, and the musicians are mistaken for a new composition: something like this usually play on the warm-up of the British indie groups. Suddenly, a girl gets up from a chair, approaches the microphone and begins to play a long and dreary to play the musicians. The song ends, the music is interrupted, the girl takes her friend and leaves, the musicians dive into the back room one by one, from where loud laughter and voices grow. In the Dark Hall in the yards on Gorokhova there was only a grandfather with Kalimbami. He does not need a company, tea or a smoke break, and he quietly taps with sandals on the floor and presses on the keys to the beat.