“We became the size of our competitors by the market shrinking them”: How Taylor Guitars became one of the world’s biggest acoustic guitar companies
“Taylor Guitars was started 50 years ago – this is our 50th anniversary. I’m surprised that we stayed in business!” remarks Bob Taylor, co-founder of one of the leading guitar companies on the planet.
He may be surprised, but the rest of the guitar world isn’t; Taylor has been producing top-quality acoustic guitars for half a century, some of which now find themselves in the hands of the world’s best-loved players, including Taylor Swift, Jason Mraz, Zac Brown and so many more.
“We make a lot of guitars,” Bob goes on. “You can run but you can’t hide from it: we’ve made a lot of guitars and they’re everywhere.”
Guitar.com recently had the pleasure of visiting Taylor HQ in El Cajon, California for a tour of its factory, and to have an in-depth conversation with Bob about his beginnings as a guitar maker, and the legacy his company has created some 50 years later.
“When I was 12 years old I got interested in guitar playing,” he tells us. “This was long before I made a guitar. And I thought, ‘This is fun. I wanna learn to do this. I bought a little $3 guitar – acoustic – from a neighbour across the street. I played that guitar for a while.
“Pretty soon it had painted-on binding. One day I sawed the neck off of it – I tried to make an electric guitar out of it. For me, solving a problem wasn’t the main thing; it was finding out how things worked. Everything I owned I took apart. My guitar making was really a lot about, ‘How is this thing made? What’s this thing around the soundhole – is that painted or or Inlayed?’”
And while Taylor Guitars is a resounding success story now, Bob’s humble beginnings lasted for several years before the company really got off the ground. In our conversation, he recalls partnering with co-founder Kurt Listug and a third employee, Steve Schemmer, to purchase the shop they all worked for, American Dream in 1974, when Bob was still a teenager.
“I had the brain to look at wood and machines, and figure out what a guitar could be and how we could go about making it. And Kurt had the brain to put together legal documents and budget. He does what he needs to do and I do what I need to do. We don’t really get all up in each other’s decisions.
But despite their promising collective business acumen, Bob says it was “years” before they started making money. “I survived on eating Campbell’s tomato soup and liverwurst as those were two really cheap foods to buy… I think we were six years into it when I said, ‘I wanna get paid!’
Of course, those slow beginnings eventually blossomed into one of the biggest guitar companies in the world today, and that was largely due to changes in the market in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, upon the rise of disco music and glam rock.
“The other acoustic guitar manufacturers shrunk,” Bob recalls. “Martin shrunk from their all-time 135-year historical high of making 20,000 guitars a year. They only made 5,000 guitars at the most… We had gotten up to making three guitars a day. And all of a sudden instead of us making one guitar and Martin making 80 in a day, they were making nine guitars a day and we were making four.
“Gibson quit making guitars – they had shut down. Guild had shut down. People weren’t doing it… But when the market came back, we had some chops and a few dealers. We had a little bit of a name. So we got to grow with the regrowth of the acoustic guitar business.
“We became the size of some of our competitors by the market shrinking them. It couldn’t shrink us. We couldn’t be shrunk any smaller.”
Watch the full Guitar.com interview with Bob Taylor above.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
