Taylor Guitar Founder

Years ago, Bob Taylor wrote a wish list describing the type of person he wanted to replace him as top designer for his namesake company.

They needed to be a self-taught guitar maker. A native San Diegan. A professional player. They couldn’t be older than 30 but still needed two decades of experience building instruments — and they should be a fundamentally good person.

On Monday, Taylor and co-founder Kurt Listug told employees they were stepping back as Taylor Guitar’s president and CEO to hand the reins to Powers.

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The move is a significant shift for the East County powerhouse, which started nearly 50 years ago in Lemon Grove and now annually brings in around $150 million from guitars and other gear made in El Cajon and Tecate, Mexico.

“We love this region, we love the work that we do and we love that we get to continue doing it long into the future, ” the 41-year-old Powers said in an interview.

Powers kept at it, and within five years he was repairing instruments for guitar shops all over the city. By the time he was 12 he’d made so much money the IRS came calling for their share in taxes, he said.

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Powers and his dad bought tickets to Reid’s San Diego show. When they got to their seats, Powers recognized a man sitting nearby: Bob Taylor.

Around 2010 at a trade show, Taylor happened to see Powers play with San Diego icon Jason Mraz. (A more recent video of the two on stage shows Powers more than holding his own.)

Weeks later, Taylor was sitting at an El Cajon stop light. He thought about that list he’d shoved in a drawer. He thought about Powers. For crying out loud, the guy’s middle name was literally “Taylor, ” after his mother.

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Taylor made Powers an offer. You can keep your current gig building custom guitars and make a dozen people happy a year, he said. “Or you could take that same talent and make a couple hundred thousand people happy.”

He oversaw several changes in how instruments were made, including an overhaul of an acoustic guitar’s internal structure. Known as V-Class Bracing, the redesign gave musicians more control over pitch and allowed notes to hit louder and longer.

Powers also impressed his bosses with how he learned other parts of the business, from marketing to human resources, and he was named co-owner in 2019.

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Last year, the company became one of the few prominent instrument makers to shift ownership to its approximately 1, 200 employees. At the time, leaders described the move as a way to keep the business independent.

The two founders eventually decided Powers should take both their jobs. His first day as president, CEO and chief designer was May 3.

Powers also has a music degree from UC San Diego. He lives in Carlsbad with his wife and three children: two boys and a girl, all under 12.

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Taylor said he hopes to devote more time to other businesses, including his kitchenware maker Stella Falone. Taylor Guitars has long pushed for ways to improve their supply chain, from recycling urban lumber to replanting trees in Cameroon, and the former president hopes to keep turning discarded wood into new products.One of the biggest names in the acoustic world, Taylor’s rise has been rapid and revolutionary – but it all started out in a Californian co-op…

To tell the story of Taylor s, we have to go back to 1970 when a man named Sam Radding opened a shop in Lemon Grove, California called American Dream Musical Instrument Manufacturing. The shop became somewhat of a co-op as Radding later explained to the

“It was a true bootstrap operation. We took people without a lot of experience and tried to turn them into -builders. I always thought of it as a co-op because I didn’t set any hours. If people had equipment, they could bring it in. They could use their own hand-tools. If I remember correctly, it was a 60/40 split. They would get 60 per cent and the shop would get 40 per cent. We had this huge collection of really interesting people. A lot of people came into the shop and wanted a bench to work at. They had to convince me. I had to know they deserved it.”

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Among the builders who earned a bench there were Greg Deering [of Deering Banjo Company], Larry Breedlove [of Breedlove s], and James Goodall [of Goodall s], and Bob Taylor. Taylor came to the shop right out of high school in 1972 and began to hone his skills. There, he met another employee at the shop named Kurt Listug, who was a junior at SDSU studying philosophy and German, while building s in his spare time. It would be the start of something very special.

In 1974, Radding ran into some financial trouble, and told his employees that if they could come up with $2, 400, they could have the shop. Taylor, Listug, and another employee named Steve Schemmer pooled their resources to come up with the required cash, and the co-op became a bona fide business.

The trio renamed American Dream the Westland Music Company, but quickly found that shortening the name of the company would be better represented on headstocks. Ultimately the name was changed to Taylor – a couple reasons have been presented as to why Taylor’s name was chosen. First, they felt it sounded more American than Listug or Schemmer, but as Listug reflected in a 2011 interview, “Bob was the real -maker.”

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From the early days, Listug would handle the business end of things and Taylor handled design and production. Two years later, the pair decided that they were going to make the leap and sell their s through retailers – a massive step for a small brand.

In this period, Martin-style acoustics were the industry standard instrument, and those early Taylors were created to be essentially more affordable takes on the classic Martin designs. That being said, these first Taylor s did offer some benefits aside from just their price point – mainly focused on the necks. Taylor’s bolt-on necks were much easier to repair than glued-in ones, and the necks themselves had a lower profile and were available in varying widths, which made them nice for a wider array of ists.

Despite this, the company was struggling to make a profit. They were producing about 10 s per week by the late 70s, but their distribution deal wasn’t great, marginalising their profits, so they ended the deal in 1979.

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The early 80s was a time in Taylor’s history that saw a lot of changes. In 1981, the company took out a loan to buy tools to streamline production, but a bigger issue was one out of the trio’s control entirely. With synth-driven music and heavy metal dominating the airwaves in the early 80s, there simply wasn’t the level of demand for acoustic s as there had been in previous decades.

Then in 1983 the trio became a duo – original investor Steve Schemmer sold his stake and left the company, leaving Listug and Taylor to focus their attention on marketing their s to distributors and keeping afloat in an industry that had little interest in acoustic instruments. The company was making enough money to keep itself going, but Taylor was very much a small-scale operation.

All that would change at the 1985 NAMM Show. At the show, Taylor debuted their Artist Series – a limited run of instruments that had tops stained various colours with interesting soundhole motifs. The s caught the eye of none other than Prince, who commissioned Taylor to build him a 12-string – in purple of course.

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The was promptly created and delivered to Paisley Park, and soon the ist was using it on stage and in the studio. It was a huge breakthrough for the brand – but it came with a catch. As with his other custom instruments of the time, Prince didn’t want any of his live instruments to bear a visible brand name during that era, so they lost out on that massive marketing bonus.

Nevertheless, it did create a buzz and eventually people came to know who built the . Artist commissions for Steve Stevens, Dan Crary and Leo Kottke soon followed, and these artist associations established Taylor as a high-quality brand – a reputation that remains to this day.

In the decades since, Taylor has proudly forged its own path, innovating in its own direction in terms of body shapes, design, and various other innovations. Perhaps the most enduring Taylor innovation is the NT neck joint – a patented new approach to bolt-on necks that allowed for unprecedented ability to adjust the neck and ease of repair, and continues to be used to this day.

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Taylor s has also been at the forefront of popularizing alternative and exotic tonewoods, and even teamed up with the legendary Rupert Neve to design their own pickup system and preamp, which in typical Taylor style does things a little differently to the rest of the industry.

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Posted by zodaries14

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