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00:00Let me just say something as my observation. I think that if you erased Taylor guitars from history, the music we listen to today would be different. Now that's a huge claim of people like who does he think he is? Well, just listen to my logic.
00:18I mean, think about that. We're building guitars. The perfect intersection of art and engineering. People here really care about the guitars that they're working on. Well, if you ask my daughter, she thinks I play guitar all day. I mean, it's hard to ask for more than that.
00:39The magic is the guitar is comfortable to play, easy to play. It plays accurate notes. It's got great intonation. It's super easily repairable. It's that first strum. You put your fingers down, you play a note, and you're like, I like that.
00:58I want to build a guitar that's better than the last one I made. I want to build that instrument that's more than what a musician could ask for and do it so that a person can feel some joy and some expression and something that draws a unique, special character out of their own musicality. I want to build that guitar.
01:19When I started making guitars, there were electric guitar players and acoustic guitar players, and they did not intermingle, and they didn't share their talent. And all of this is blended now. Now you see a guy with an acoustic guitar playing through a pedalboard, and you see a guy with a Stratocaster and a capo on the seventh fret strumming.
01:44So what I'm saying is that, just like this machine behind me changed manufacturing, because these people decided to make a machine. Well, we decided to make a guitar, and it helped musicians. And the electric player and the acoustic player were able to kind of flow together. Now, we're not the only ones that participate in that now, but we were the genesis of that.
02:07Well, I made three guitars when I was in high school, and I didn't know what binding was or what fret wire was or anything like that. And I searched in the Yellow Pages, the old phone book, and I found a place called the American Dream. It was just a little hippie shop, and I loved it. I learned a lot from the owner named Sam Radding, who was a good craftsman.
02:31Now, my partner, Kurt, for 50 years now, we didn't know each other when we ended up in business together. Sam, the owner of 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, put together your proposal, and we'll vote on it.
02:50And 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? He goes, oh, this guy Bob Taylor. Well, get him to be your partner, and I'll loan you the money.
03:06People go, so what's your opinion, Bob, about what made Taylor successful? And I go, well, buying Kurt's partnership. Kurt will always say, people loved his guitars, but they would have loved a lot less of them if it wasn't me and Kurt together.
03:20Bob and Kurt, at the beginning, before even Andy came in, so we can put him in there as well, they built a culture for us, I think, that just makes you want to be here.
03:33It comes from the top. You know, Bob always talks about he was a high school kid that loved working with wood and wanted to build guitars. He's a dreamer, and I think that's the same thing with Andy and Kurt. And so I think that is a part of the culture. It's okay to dream here, and it's encouraged to turn that into a reality.
03:52I found that the more I wanted to learn, if I asked about it, somebody would teach me. If I wanted to take something on, people would give me that responsibility and kind of the tools that I needed.
04:05They're all very respectful of what everyone has to say, regardless of the fact that they've all been building guitars longer than I've been alive. I still have a voice in that conversation.
04:18It's really good to be able to hear an idea and not patronize them. You never know who's going to say the perfect solution.
04:30People ask me, like, what, are you a guitar player? Are you a maker? Whatever, but it's sort of both.
04:37Well, I was 12 years old. I got interested in guitar playing. I bought a little $3 guitar, acoustic, from a neighbor across the street. Mike Broward was his name.
04:46I played that guitar for a while, and then pretty soon it had painted on binding. I worked on it. One day I sawed the neck off of it with a saw, tried to make an electric guitar out of it.
04:56Finding out how things work, everything I owned I took apart. Some of them I never got to be able to put back together.
05:07Yeah, it could be said that I was disrespectful to what people had done before me, but it wasn't disrespect. It was total ignorance.
05:16I really did not know how other guitars were made. 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.
05:27I would keep shaving that neck until it felt good in my hand. Two weeks into the first guitar I made in high school, I have to do this. This is what I want to do. I won't be satisfied with something else.
05:37Actually, when I finished my first guitar, that was really what cemented that this was the right path for me to be taking.
05:46Oh, wow. Okay, well, if you want to go all the way back, I was six years old, actually. That's when I started to play guitar.
05:53It started for me as a young kid, not so much in guitars, but in woodworking. That was my first passion.
05:58I took a liking to the guitar very early, around nine. I think I was nine years old, and then started taking it more seriously around 11.
06:10Somewhere in my 40s, 50s, I thought, well, in order for me to prepare for when I'm in my 60s, 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.
06:23I didn't step back by not coming in. I didn't step back by buying a boat or something like that. Plus, I get seasick. So, who's that person going to be?
06:34I literally sat down and wrote, dear God, I need one guitar maker who's a good person, can do a lifelong commitment, understands guitar making, deep, deep history of it.
06:46We knew who each other were, but after a whole day I spent with him, a week later, I was just sitting at a traffic light, and I'm like, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check. This is the guy.
06:59I started in business officially when I was somewhere between 12 and 13 years old. At that time, I had started to do repairs and restorations for a lot of the local music shops.
07:12It was this funny scenario where they'd call my mom and dad. They'd leave a message and tell me what guitars they had that were broken. My mom or my dad would drive me around. We'd pick up all the guitars. I'd take them all home, fix them. Next week, drive them back, drop them all off.
07:29By having a guitar factory and building it, 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.
07:44The first time you get something like a CNC machine, you use it to copy something that you're doing by hand. Then one day, you go, wait a minute, I'm wasting this potential.
07:59This is how it came to pass that 20 years after the first CNC in our shop, we were able to introduce the NT neck, because that neck is precision, and the pocket that it goes into the guitar is precision. You can't do that by hand.
08:20Now, some people get the wrong idea. Oh, those guitars are all automated. No, I have 50 of these. I have 800 people making guitars. They're not all standing around this machine.
08:30You see the guitars, you see how beautiful they are, and you might think of automation. You see robots in other industries. Well, we have some of that, and there's still so much handwork that goes into it.
08:50We had taken our flagship, kind of iconic guitar design, the 814, the whole 800 series of different shapes, and we changed everything about it. We literally did every possible thing that could make that guitar cooler.
09:07All right, so now what? If we want to do better than that, what form does that come in? Because I'm going to start building a new guitar, and I want it to be better than the last one we built. That means we need a different approach to guitar altogether.
09:25When Bob first saw a V-Class guitar, he didn't see it. He heard it.
09:31Here's a spot a couple miles straight west of here, and in the wintertime, we'll get some bigger swells there. It's real strong and powerful. It's a dynamic experience.
09:42And instead of a great riding day that I was hoping for, it was windy and white capping, just not rideable. And I can see the swell rolling in the way that it had been forecasted to.
09:57Well, the swell's there, but all the local wind pattern just ruined it.
10:04You know, maybe there's something here for me, because this is still, to some degree, this is still what's happening in my guitar.
10:12I've got a little bit of inharmonic distortion that's still ruining the musical orderly part that I want.
10:21And so I came back to the shop. I was working on this guitar, and I was sitting here playing it.
10:28He walked in the door to kind of just pass through the room, get into something else, and he stopped halfway and goes, what changed?
10:37It's like every day of my life, I've walked through a door with a squeaky hinge, and somebody just oiled the hinge, and something is missing.
10:47There's something that I didn't like that's now gone, and it's better.
10:52When I came on the scene, there was rosewood and mahogany, sometimes maple. You know, that was the menu for acoustic guitars.
11:00Next thing you know, well, we're making some guitars out of walnut, walnut from California, which is really beautiful walnut, different species than what you'd find in the Midwest.
11:10And then Koa, Koa came into my life.
11:15And then Koa, Koa came into my life.
11:19And we have wood sellers that say, Bob, no one's going to use this wood until Taylor uses it.
11:24Will you please use it, help popularize it, and then other people will use this wood, and we need to.
11:30So I knew peripherally before I got here, you know, that Taylor had initiatives to, you know, maintain the Koa forests, maintain the Ebony forests.
11:41But I had no idea the extent to which they really did commit to.
11:47You have to realize who you are in the ecosystem, right?
11:51And there was a point in time when in the ecosystem, we were just a little tiny place just out there trying to tell our story and talk one person into buying one guitar.
12:01Now, it's not something that's a huge sense of pride anymore. It's more of responsibility.
12:09I sometimes joke that my job doesn't exist in nature. It's solely the creation of Bob Taylor.
12:16My entire profession career, I've been an environmental policy analyst, an activist. I was 14 years at Greenpeace.
12:25And he understood what was happening and understood that if Taylor Guitars wants to be in business in another 50 years,
12:34we need to start paying serious attention to what's happening to the planet's forests and how governments are reacting to it and how we can be a responsible corporate citizen.
12:46Some of the work that is being done by our colleagues in Hawaii, planting Koa trees for future generations of instrument use, that's incredible.
12:55To me, it's as important as the day we went from hunter-gatherers to farmers.
12:59You're not just going into a forest to look for a tree and take it and go make what you need to make.
13:04You're actually planting, planting ahead and planting for what you eventually would want to be using, creating a habitat, creating an environment while that's being done.
13:16And by the way, sustainability is just a step. You never arrive.
13:20You can't say you're sustainable because that's a unique word with a unique definition and none of us, none of us meet that definition, right?
13:29But it's a journey and you're trying to leave more choices to the people that come behind us than maybe we had when we arrived on the scene.
13:38And it happened one day, the attorney accountant said, when you sell your company, that's the start of his answer.
13:53I can't remember what the question was so much, but I said, well, I'm not going to sell the company.
13:58He said, Bob, you're going to sell your company. You will sell it.
14:01You're going to sell it on the day you die or some day before that.
14:06Since we've already had the culture of being sort of a family, having that family culture work, that sort of owner mentality, ownership mentality has been there even before we were employee owned.
14:18While you don't kind of feel the immediate effects of an ESOP, like in your personal life, I think knowing the long term effects of what that will do, like the investment that that will bring to your future is a really cool thing to be a part of.
14:33When we look towards the future, we want it to remain as a healthy, sound, beneficial thing for our musical community and for our physical community, for our own employees, for our vendors.
14:46I mean, the guitars we make, we know will outlive all of us.
14:50Why not the company?
14:52The dream was to was to just make it work.
14:55I had no, no comprehension that it would turn into this.
15:00I just wanted to keep doing it each day.
15:02I would have paid to do it.
15:03I would have gotten another job and it would have become my hobby if I had to.
15:07When we look at our future and when we look at our past, one thing that remains true is that we want to do the best we can with what's been entrusted to us.
15:19That's just incredible.
15:21That's a thrilling future to be part of.