Mollard Conducting Batons has Worldwide Reach

If you build a better conducting baton, the world apparently will beat a path to your door, whether you expect them to or not.

Bob Mollard of Mollard Conducting Batons on Cleveland-Massillon Road, had no idea what he was starting when built his first baton from a wine bottle cork and a dowel rod. Mollard was a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music when the instructor for his conducting class challenged him to find a balanced, lightweight baton for class. Not finding what he wanted at local music stores, Mollard decided to build his own.

“Other people in the class wanted what I had, so I made batons for them. Then the professor started showing it around and the phone started to ring,” Mollard said.

Orders started pouring in and Mollard was “going nuts” trying to fill them, he said. So in 1981, he asked his retired mother, Audrey, who lives in this area, if she wanted to go into business. Mollard manufactured the batons and his mother marketed the product and fulfilled the orders.

By 1990, the business had outgrown their arrangement. Mollard and his wife, Connie, moved to Akron and took over as Mollard’s mother, who will be 90 this summer, eased out of day-to-day operations, Mollard said.

Today, Mollard Conducting Batons employs 10 people at its Cleveland-Massillon Road location where the company manufactures and sells four styles of conducting batons. Mollard said he believes his company has the “lion’s share” of baton sales in the country. “It would be fair to say that of all baton makers, we are almost without doubt the most well known name,” Mollard said. Among his clients are Akron Symphony Orchestra Music Director Christopher Wilkins and conductors of orchestras in New York, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, London and Frankfurt, Germany, as well as high school band directors and church music directors across the country.

Mollard sells his products through mail and phone orders and the company website. Mollard Conducting Batons can be found in music stores and Mollard has a team of sales people who attend conventions and trade shows.

Business, Mollard said, is good. “Like everyone else, we got hammered in 2008 and 2009, but we got meaner and leaner and now we’re back in a growth phase,” he said.

Mollard, a musician by trade, said he never aspired to becoming a businessman. He considers himself lucky, though, that he has been able to develop a business that allows him to continue to be a musician. “Lots of musicians have to work at Burger King” to supplement their incomes, Mollard said.

Along with running the business, Mollard is principal keyboardist for the Akron Symphony Orchestra, associate director of the Summit Choral Society and organist and choir master at Faith Lutheran Church in Fairlawn.