50 Years Young – how Taylor Guitars became the world’s most innovative guitar brand
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“I’m surprised that we didn’t go out of business because Kurt and I started it when I was 19. He was 21. I’d made a couple of guitars and he’d repaired some guitars and we just dove in. But people liked the necks of our guitars, and they liked the sound of our guitars, and they got better and better over the years. And between us, we managed to grow a successful company.”
When Bob Taylor describes the genesis of the company that will become Taylor Guitars, it’s worth repeating – even more so as the company celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. What started out with two kids who barely knew each other going into business together building guitars has become one of the most successful, well-known and innovative brands in the MI space. Throughout the brand’s five decades, Taylor has pioneered developments in manufacturing, construction, electronics, wood choice and sustainability that have changed the world of guitar and music so profoundly that they’ve become the standard way of operating for everyone else.
As we sit down with Bob to chart the remarkable rise of the company that bears his name, surrounded by wood, tools and machines in his private workshop on the Taylor campus, we can’t help but wonder which came first for him, guitars or guitar building?
“People ask me, ‘Are you a guitar player or are you a maker?’ But it’s sort of both,” Taylor reflects. “My parents made stuff, my mom sewed clothes, my folks repaired our furniture and our cars, and my dad fixed our stuff. He made furniture. And so I grew up in a family that made stuff.
Everything I owned, I took apart. Some of them I never got to be able to put back together!
And I did that from when I was young, from repainting my bicycle to finally one day making a guitar in high school woodshop. When I was 12 years old, I got interested in guitar playing. This was long before I made a guitar, but I thought, ‘This is fun! I want to learn to do this!’
“So I bought a little $3 guitar, an acoustic, from our neighbour across the street, Mike Broward, was his name. I played that guitar for a while, and then pretty soon I painted it, I’d painted on binding… I worked on it. Then one day I took the neck off of it with a saw, trying to make an electric guitar out of it! So those two things just merged.
In the days when I made my first guitar, Martin was making guitars, Gibson was, Guild was still around, but I’d never heard of those guitars. I didn’t know what they were. In fact, when I made my first guitar, the thought never even crossed my mind that somebody could build a guitar. I didn’t see my first good guitar until I’d made a few.”
Bob Taylor and Kurt Listug hard at work in the American Dream shop (Image: Taylor Guitars)
Building Foundations
It’s impossible to talk about the early days of the company without also talking about The American Dream – this curious San Diego hippie co-op that made custom acoustic guitars to order. One of those American Dream guitars still hangs on the wall of Bob’s office today.
“I made three guitars when I was in high school, and I didn’t know I didn’t know what binding was or what fretwire was or anything like that,” Taylor explains. “And I searched in the Yellow Pages, and I found a place called the American Dream. And I went out there and was like, ‘Wow, they had this stuff called fretwire, and they had abalone in little sheets!’ So I started buying stuff from them.
“Then I graduated from high school in 1973, and I went down there and talked to them – it was a hippie shop, there was no real employment that was, you know, government approved! There wasn’t a paycheck, it was a co-op. And you got a bench laid out in two by fours, and a customer would come in and they’d order a guitar and, ‘Okay Bob, you make this guitar!’ So I made the guitar, split the money with the owner of the shop. He paid for the materials, the utilities, all of that. It was just a little hippie shop, and I loved it.
“I learned a lot from the owner, Sam Redding – he was a good craftsman and his guitar making wasn’t at all like the brands. It was his thinking that got planted in me first. And I continued making guitars, just our guitars, not anybody else’s. I didn’t study the other guitars that were out there.”
For Taylor, the idea that he would do anything else but make guitars with his life was set in stone before he even walked through the door at American Dream.
“I decided when I was two weeks into the first guitar I made in high school that I had to do this,” he says firmly. “This is what I want to do. I won’t be satisfied with something else. It was the scariest decision of my life, and happy at the same time, because I had no idea how I was going to do that. Like, how am I ever going to make any money? How am I going to pay rent?
“At the American Dream, it was okay. I made a little bit of money. I was living with four roommates in a house, and I had a little bit of money. When we started Taylor Guitars, that’s when I became completely broke, almost destitute. I spent a lot of time living in my van.
“I had no comprehension that it would turn into this. I just wanted to keep doing it each day. I would have paid to do it. I would have gotten another job and it would have become my hobby if I had to.”
Selling The Dream
Not long after Bob started working in the shop, Radding announced he was selling American Dream, and encouraged the builders who worked there to make him an offer so the shop could continue. Fatefully, Bob would partner with two other builders at the shop, Steve Schemmer and Kurt Listug to purchase the shop outright. Within a few years the American Dream would evolve into Taylor Guitars… but at this point, Kurt and Bob didn’t even know each other.
Yeah, my partner Kurt of 50 years now, we didn’t know each other when we ended up in business together,” Taylor chuckles. “Sam, the owner of the American Dream, wanted to leave. He wanted to go do something else. And so he said, ‘We’re going to be democratic – if you want to buy the shop, let me know, put together your proposal and we’ll vote on it.’
“Well, Kurt, with his neighbour across the street, Steve Schemmer, decided they were going to do it, and Kurt went out and made this business plan. And I got together with a buddy of mine who was working side by side with me, and I said, ‘Maybe we’ll buy it, too!’
“And then one day Kurt was asking his father about loaning him some money to do this. And his dad said, ‘Well, Kurt, do you know how to make guitars?’ He goes, ‘No, not really’. He said, ‘Well, who down there does?, And he goes, ‘Oh, this guy, Bob Taylor’. ‘Well, get him to be your partner and I’ll loan you the money.’ So Kurt said, ‘Hey, Bob, you want to join us and partner up?’ And I go, ‘Yeah, why not?’ We were just kids making guitars.”
Bob’s name might have ended up on the headstock of the guitars they were making, but he’s insistent that Taylor’s success is as much about what Kurt was doing behind the scenes as what Bob was doing at his workbench.
“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. But Kurt had the brain to put together legal documents and a budget,” Taylor explains. “People ask me what made Taylor successful? And I go, ‘Mine and Kurt’s partnership’. Kurt will always say, ‘I think it was Bob’s guitars… people loved his guitars’, and I suppose that’s true, but they would have loved a lot less of them if it wasn’t me and Kurt together.”
Making A Difference
From the start, Taylor guitars have been different. We could be here a while listing all the innovations that Taylor has popularised that have ended up becoming industry standards – thinner necks, pickup systems, smaller body sizes, alternative tonewoods… – but they all come from a fundamental place of innovation with the player’s needs in mind. For Taylor himself, however, he has a more humble way of looking at it.
“It could be said that I was disrespectful to what people had done before me. But it wasn’t disrespect – it was total ignorance,” he insists. “I really did not know how other guitars were made. I just didn’t know it. So I just looked at this thing. It’s shaped this way. It’s supposed to do this. I want to play it when it’s done. I would keep shaving that neck until it felt good in my hand. The thought didn’t cross my mind that it would be weak, and if it was weak I figured out a way to solve that. I never was a repairman. I didn’t learn what I would do by working on vintage guitars. I was just on my own.”
A huge but less overt influence that Taylor has had on the wider industry is the embracing of advanced and specialised machinery to allow craftsmen to focus more of their time on the important stuff.
“I am a tweaker, in the sense that I want to tweak the process every day and make it a little bit better,” Bob agrees. “And machinery and all this stuff just fascinates me.”
We offer that it seems that in some ways, Bob’s fascination with cool machines and new technology has been what has driven Taylor to become the world’s most innovative and forward-thinking guitar brand.
“It’s a huge part of it!” he exclaims. “Like, let’s say you were a fashionista and you owned a clothing store. Someone might say, ‘Gosh, I own this store so that I can wear all these clothes, and support my habit!’ And there’s a lot of similarities in that by having a guitar factory and building it up, it’s like, ‘Oh wow, we’re big enough to buy a computer controlled lathe, even though we don’t need a lathe, but we could buy it to make this one knob on one thing…’
“And now we’re into some new technology. I just love that stuff. I’m thrilled every time a load of wood comes in, or a new machine comes in – even if it’s just a duplicate of something we already have. Like this machine behind me, I mean we’ve got 55 or 60 of these things between our two factories, and it’s still a thrill when they come in.”
Wood And Steel
Bob Taylor grading ebony fingerboards with Crelicam employees Emma and Michel (Image: Taylor Guitars)
Ah yes, wood. Back when Taylor started out making guitars, the recipe for acoustic guitars was pretty nailed down – spruce, rosewood, mahogany and maybe some maple thrown in there too – and there was little to be gained from deviating from that formula.
Of course, Taylor was never a brand to stick to the tried and tested, and it wasn’t long before Bob began exploring other woods – decades later, everyone is talking about alternative tonewoods and sustainability.
“In many ways, the best part of guitar making is over when you open the log and look at it. It’s like, ‘Wow!’ you know?” Taylor enthuses. “All your hopes and dreams are in that moment, and now you’ve got to get to work and make a guitar. And that’s fun too. But there’s nothing like looking inside a log.
“I’ve just really enjoyed exploring different woods. You know, when I came on the scene, there was rosewood and mahogany, sometimes maple – that was the menu for acoustic guitars. Next thing you know, well, we’re making some guitars out of walnut from California. And then koa came into my life, right? We could buy it from lumber companies in San Diego, back before the state of Hawaii closed their property for koa harvesting. So I fell in love with koa, and it just sort of expanded out from there. We’d find some really beautiful wood, you’d pick it up, bend it, tap it, and go, ‘Well, that’ll make a guitar’. And we would do it.
“And so the day came when, sapele came our way, and ovangkol, and a few things like this. And by then Taylor was popular enough that if we used it, it emboldened other people to use it. ‘If Taylor can do it, then I guess we can do it too’. We’d have wood sellers say, ‘Bob no-one’s going to use this wood until Taylor uses it. Will you please use it?’
“So we helped popularise it, and then other people would use that wood too – and we need to, because you can’t just rely on the same woods. You can’t just fish in that same fishing hole for these other timbers.”
Taylor in 2024 is a company with the sustainability journey at the forefront of everything they do – from the Ebony Project in Cameroon and the Koa Project in Hawaii, to recent Urban Wood initiatives. In recent years Taylor’s approach has become widely replicated across the industry, and we wonder if it makes Bob feel proud to have started something so significant for the future of our industry.
“Now it’s not something where there’s a huge sense of pride anymore, it’s more of a responsibility,” he admits. “We need to use this wood and see if it’s going to work, because if it does, other people will use it. Someone has to go first. Sometimes they say you don’t want to be first, you don’t want to be last, you want to be in the middle. But we tend to feel like we want to be first.”
Changing Hands
Responsibility is a word that epitomises a lot of the modern Taylor – it’s something that in recent years has been reflected in the way that Bob and Kurt have prepared the company for a future without its founders at the helm. Back in 2011 Taylor brought in Andy Powers as the company’s new design chief, and then in 2022 named him President & CEO. In an even more unique and meaningful move, the company also transitioned to an Employee Stock Ownership Plan model, which handed ownership of Taylor Guitars over to its employees. For Bob, both moves have been a long time coming. Very long.
“I started thinking about the fact that I can’t do it forever in my mid twenties,” he reveals. “One day I asked our attorney a question and the start of his answer was, ‘Well, when you sell your company…’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m not going to sell the company!’ And he said, ‘Bob, you’re going to sell your company. You will sell it. You’re going to sell it on the day you die or some day before that.’
There are inevitable things, you can deny them all your life. But it’s inevitable that everything comes to an end, including you, me, all of us in this room, there’s an end to our life. And then there’s miniature ends on the way to the final end. So I decided to embrace it. Start planning for it. So then I thought, okay, the day is going to come when that’s going to happen. And I put it off as long as possible. Somewhere in my forties or fifties, I thought, Well, in order for me to prepare for when I’m in my sixties, I need to make sure that there are more people that are doing the things that I do now, which meant that I had to step back.
I didn’t step back by not coming in. I didn’t step back by buying a boat or, you know, something like that. Plus, I get seasick! I worked every day, I was doing my thing, but you step back a little – and it was just a long, long burn. And then that moved us all the way slowly into the position where we are now.”
A big part of why he was determined to do this is because he saw how other companies – guitars and otherwise – ended up compromising their core values as they got bigger, in the quest for more profits and more growth.
“Someone starts making guitars like I did because they want to make guitars, and then pretty soon that business grows to where there needs to be adult supervision, right?” he explains. “And so then those come in the form of accountants and marketing and sales and finance and, you know, legal and that kind of thing. And they’re always more professional, they’re always more educated. Maybe stronger personalities. And over time, the factory can become sort of this necessary evil, you know.
“They say, ‘Why don’t we go have this thing made somewhere else where it could be cheaper?’ And our company could change. That’s not something I ever wanted for Taylor. I always feel like all of that administrative power is there to support the guitar making. That’s why it’s there.
“The guitar making isn’t there to support all these other jobs. I would lose the marketing before I lose the factory. I’d lose accounting before I lose the factory. The factory shall survive as long as I have something to say about it. Because it’s what the company actually really is and everything else is in support of that.
With that in mind, Bob and Kurt knew that they needed to find someone to lead the company into a world without them in charge – and that process would NOT be easy.
“I started thinking,‘Wow, I’m on this path that my reign will come to an end… so who’s that person going to be?’ A person that’s a good enough guitar maker to be our wellspring, and smart enough to have a seat at the table that can understand the business. And Andy came my way, which was just a miracle. I mean, I, I literally sat down and wrote a list of everything I wanted, and five years later, I met Andy and it was just like, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check. This is the guy.
And I don’t often write down what I want. Like, maybe I’ve done it once, and I felt I needed a miracle that one time. You know, you need like one miracle in your life, maybe two. You don’t need one every day. The rest of it is just working to work it out, you know, whatever. But these are things you can’t work out. You can’t advertise on Monster.com for this person. And Andy just showed up and with all those qualifications, it’s like, ‘Well, he has to be the guy – it says right here on my piece of paper that he’s it!’”
For Powers himself, the responsibility of everything that Taylor has placed on his shoulders is very keenly felt. He was running a successful business as a one-man operation, and the pressure and scale of running Taylor wasn’t a challenge he’d ever really sought out. But Taylor’s advice clearly resonates with him over a decade later.
“Bob put it this way,” Powers says. “‘In life, everyone’s given the things that they’re good at. You’re given a certain amount of ability. You’re given an opportunity, you’re given the ability to work hard, and some of us have something special, and then it’s up to us to decide what it is we’re going to do with it. So working alone, you can make a dozen musicians really happy everyday. You make them happy, you make their audiences happy, provide for your wife and your kids, and that’s great.That’s a noble pursuit. It’s wonderful.
“‘Or you can take what you’re good at and use that to provide for a thousand employees here, whose livelihoods depend on producing what you design. Thousands of folks around the world whose livelihoods depend on producing materials to build these instruments, and thousands of people around the world whose livelihoods depend on selling these things. Let alone the hundreds of thousands of musicians around the world who are playing these guitars. What’s the best usage of what’s been given to you?’”
Blue Sky Thinking
For 50 years now, Bob Taylor and Kurt Listug have stewarded Taylor Guitars to a level of success and influence that neither would have imagined when they were two relative strangers getting together to take over a hippie co-op in San Diego’s Lemon Grove. Over the decades the brand has become a byword for creativity, responsibility and doing things their own way. It’s an approach that has made their instruments beloved by thousands of artists and musicians big and small, but at the core the secret of Taylor’s success is a blend of two very important things – hard work, and an enduring love of making guitars.
When we ask Bob to look back and recall if there was a moment when he realised that Taylor was going to be a success, his answer sums up this ethos perfectly.
“There never was a moment where it’s like, hey, this is going to work. It was every day,” he reflects. “It was creeping forward. And then eventually it got to where we were stepping forward and then eventually got to leaping forward.
“But I do remember one day that was about eight years into it, on a Friday. It was a beautiful spring day like it is today. The sky was blue and it was the end of the day, which was strange because to me there was never an end of a day. But this Friday there was an end of the day – it was about five o’clock and I walked out the shop to go home to have some dinner. And as I locked the front door, I realised I was all caught up on my work and I could go home and just be done. And it was the first feeling I ever had of being done for the day – it might have been the last time too! – but that was just it was like, ‘I love my life’, you know? That was just a great moment. I’ll never forget that.”
Find out more about the last 50 years of Taylor Guitars with this interactive timeline.
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