How Many Guitar Brands Can The World Actually Support? 🎸🤔

Walking around Guitar Summit last weekend, surrounded by what felt like several thousand different ways of attaching six strings to a piece of wood, I had a thought...

How the hell do all these companies sell enough guitars? 😂

The official Guitar Summit directory listed 615 brands this year. Not all guitar manufacturers, obviously, but there were an awful lot of them. In fact, an entire level of the show was dedicated to boutique exhibitors, with everything from established international manufacturers to one-man builders I'd never come across before.

And that's one show.

Add all the brands that weren't there and the number of companies around the world trying to sell you a guitar must be enormous. Then consider that most of those brands don't just make a guitar. They make dozens of them. Different shapes, pickups, scale lengths, price points and colours. Six strings, seven strings, eight strings, baritones, headless.

We're certainly not innocent here. JET, Spira, Patina and Flight all have sizeable ranges, and I've already seen enough of what's coming next to know we're not exactly planning to slow down. 😂

So how does everyone survive?

I think the answer is actually quite interesting, because "enough" is a completely different number for every business.

A global guitar company with factories, hundreds of employees, international distribution and huge overheads needs serious volume. A smaller international brand might need thousands of instruments a year. A boutique builder with a small workshop and a couple of people needs considerably fewer, while somebody building extremely high-end guitars largely by themselves might only need a handful of customers every month.

They're all technically competing in the same guitar market, but they're playing completely different games. Guitar Summit really brings that home. You can walk from a large stand representing a global manufacturer straight onto the boutique floor and meet the person who actually built the guitar you're holding.

Neither business model is necessarily better. They just have completely different definitions of success.

But there's another reason I think the guitar market can sustain so much choice.

Guitarists are terrible at deciding when they have enough guitars.

I was reminded of this on our stand.

A guy picked up a Patina PT-6 and absolutely loved it. After playing it for a while, he looked at me and said he loved the guitar but already had enough T-style guitars.

So I asked him: "How do you decide how many is enough?"

He laughed. His son laughed.

I maintain that it was a perfectly reasonable question. 😂

Because guitars aren't washing machines.

Most people buy a new washing machine because the old one has broken. They'll then generally be out of the washing-machine market until that one starts causing problems too.

Unless you're my dad.

My mum has had the same washing machine for about 15 years. She's lusted after various replacements whenever it's developed a problem, only for Dad to fix it and get it running again.

Fifteen years.

I don't know many guitarists who'd happily go 15 years without buying another guitar. 😂

Guitarists don't need anything to break. A guitarist can already own a perfectly good T-style guitar and still want another one. Different pickups, different neck, different finish, different feel. It might be made by one person in a workshop in Germany, or it might simply make them feel something when they pick it up.

None of those things require the guitar they already own to stop working.

And that changes the economics of our industry considerably. We're not simply fighting over who gets to supply somebody's one guitar. A significant part of the market consists of people who already own guitars and would quite like another one.

And another one.

Possibly another T-style. 😂

That creates room for niches, and the internet has completely changed how easy those niches are to reach. A small builder no longer needs hundreds of dealers around the world to find enough customers.

If you're making a relatively small number of exceptional instruments each year, you don't need every guitarist to know who you are.

You need the right guitarists to know who you are.

And that's perhaps the biggest thing that's changed.

The internet didn't necessarily make these niches bigger. It made them reachable.

If only a tiny percentage of guitarists want exactly what you make, that's a pretty terrible business if you're restricted to the people living within 50 miles of your workshop.

Across the entire world, that tiny percentage can suddenly be more customers than you'll ever have the capacity to serve.

Social media, YouTube, specialist communities, artists and direct sales have made it possible for a bloke in a workshop somewhere to find his people on the other side of the world.

Which is why I suspect asking whether there are too many guitar brands is probably the wrong question.

There are certainly a lot of them. Some will grow, some will remain deliberately tiny and some won't make it. That's business.

But you don't necessarily need a huge slice of a market to build a successful company.

You need a slice big enough to support your version of success.

And that's a useful lesson well beyond guitars.

Businesses spend an enormous amount of time looking at competitors, market share and the size of the companies around them. Sometimes that's necessary, but the bloke building 20 guitars a year doesn't need to beat the biggest brands in the world.

He needs to find 20 people who really want one of his guitars.

And perhaps that's one of the things I enjoyed most about Guitar Summit.

Under one roof you can have international companies selling instruments all over the world alongside craftspeople making guitars one at a time. Completely different businesses, economics and ambitions, yet there's room for both.

Partly because the market is enormous. Partly because niches are easier to reach than they've ever been.

And partly because, thankfully for everyone working in this industry, nobody has yet established exactly how many T-style guitars constitutes enough. 🎸😂