Mechanical music for the century of computers

Vasile Cocolos has been called by lots of TV stations due to his uncommon business: he is the first and the only Romanian producer of street organs. However, one who enters his house does not come across street organs, but a lot of strange wooden objects, which rather look like toys.

Vasile Cocolos, a Fine Mechanics Faculty graduate and a former engineer employed with IOR (Romanian Optics Enterprise), used to do a lot of businesses after the Revolution, from mending TV sets, furniture or upholstery, to the partnership with a Frenchman in order to start up a meat processing company.

The idea to try something with wooden objects hit him while he was talking with a client when he used to mend TV stations.

His only benefit from the partnership with the Frenchman was the possibility to travel abroad and consequently he visited Belgium, France and Switzerland, where he met several Romanians doing business there. He also saw street organs and he realised that the market of these objects was quite developed.

After having studied the Western street organs at work and after having travelled across Romania, looking for models of street organs in the antique stores, Vasile Cocolos started working. The first 40-50 street organs he manufactured between 1994 and 1997 ended in a complete failure by the time he understood how this instrument should be made.

Vasile Cocolos has sold about 30 street organs since 1997 in Switzerland, Belgium and Romania. He has recently contacted some British and posted an ad on the site of the British Organ Grinders Association, which sells street organs online, as he hopes he will soon enter this market.

As for the Romanian clientele, it is mainly comprised of high-income people, including VIPs, who have run out of ideas for eccentric and expensive gifts for bosses, colleagues, friends or relatives. One street organ manufactured by Vasile Cocolos was ordered by the Iasi-based Technical Museum, while another one is under construction and will be delivered to a famous football player on his birthday.

Is this business profitable? One street organ costs between 2,500 and 3,000 dollars and needs 7-800 dollars for the wood, the brass pipes and the paper rolls that are imported from Germany and costs DM 200 each. It takes one month to manufacture a street organ.

In addition to these instruments, Cocolos manufactures other wooden objects, such as tiny trains and mini bars and he earns some 7-10 million lei weekly by selling them. One of the most recent orders came from Gheorghe Hagi, for his Iaki hotel: Cocolos manufactured small lamps with the hotel’s logo carved on the lampshade.