Dan Smith article in Reverb

Thanks for posting....great read....

 

Great find. Thank you! I was kind-of involved in the industry back then, but most of what we heard was filtered through the UK distributor, so it was hard to know what was really going on.

 

"They were making about 300 guitars a day, and they had three inspectors for the whole thing. A guy got a raise for the more guitars he could inspect in a day. Each guy that was building guitars had to do at least 50 to get paid. They had about six builders, and if they got up to 75 they got to another level in the union. If a guy could do 150 guitars a day, that was really it—it was quantity."

And that in a nutshell explains the CBS era and why there are some really bad apples from that era with super heavy bodies and sloppy routed neck pockets..


"Anyway, we went out and pulled guitars out of the warehouse and re-inspected them, 800-and-something guitars, and out of those I think only about 15 passed the existing criteria. This after the chief of quality control had said everything was all right."

 

Thought this article was funny, because I feel this is something that Gibson suffers from right now.

"When I first started there, you go talk to someone in the factory to tell them they had to make a better product, they’d go, "**** it, we’re Fender, if the dealer doesn’t like it, we’ll just sell it to someone else." They said they never got any dealer returns. The reason they never got any dealer returns is that they wouldn’t let them send anything back "

 

Great read

 

Considering that this interview was in '92, his observation that guitar makers with any kind of a history are basically stuck making reissues of their '50s and '60s lines goes to show that some things still have a ways to go to change.

 

gracias

 

Interesting read, thank you.

 

Thanks for posting that article. Dan Smith, seems like he was quite a cool guy. Glad things worked out like they did with Schultz and crew buying Fender.

 

Yeah that was a nice story, the management buyout from CBS.

Too bad they are now owned by a variety of investment platforms.

 

Thanks for sharing!!

 

Not much new but very interesting thanks for posting

 

Well that's kind of what "management buyout" means - FMIC has had private equity investments from day one, but of course the original PE firm (or firms; not sure if they had more than one back then) were essentially investing in the management team's personnel and vision. These days the current PE firms are more investing in the "brand(s)" and the facilities.

EDIT: Well I finally got to read the article in full, and I'm a bit surprised that they originally used bank loan financing to get the company from CBS - since the PE/VC people wouldn't finance them.

 

Thanks for sharing that was a great read.

 

Makes me wonder why 70s era Fenders are fetching such high prices.

 

They are filled with something magical called 'Mojo' who make them better players than anything current

 

Old automatically = better.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Great read, thanks for sharing.
It absolutely confirms for me that you can be at the helm of a business and be clueless about the real situation in the trenches.

 

A most excellent read- especially for someone like myself who is short of the details. Many thanks for sharing

PS I'd still love me a 3 bolt strat though, doesn't put me off!