Simple Martin

To battle the Recession, Chris Martin of Martin Guitars took a page from his great-grandfather’s playbook during the Depression, reports Timothy Aeppel in the Wall Street Journal (7/6/09). Back then, Martin manufactured a "stripped-down" guitar, still made of fine materials, but devoid of fancy inlay and other flourishes. It was made of mahogany and sold for somewhere between $20 and $30, and some say it saved the company. Today, Martin is selling a similar guitar — dubbed the 1-Series — although this time around the price is between $800 and $900. But the effect is similar, because that price-point sells well in the guitar category, and Martin quickly sold out its initial run of 8,000 guitars.

"We needed something so we wouldn’t have to start laying people off," says Chis, who is the sixth generation of Martins leading the company. Keeping his highly-skilled workers employed is especially important for Chris because, over the long-run, it would be more difficult to train new workers once the recovery kicks in. The challenge was figuring out how to build a guitar that sounds like a Martin but doesn’t cost $2,000 or $3,000 like most of its other guitars — but does not use laminates instead of solid wood like Martin’s other lower-end guitars, such as the DXM. Martin was able to accomplish this in large part because its "factory is still largely run as a handcrafted process."

Building a Martin guitar involves "a series of 60 workstations, with more than 300 distinct production steps." Some automation is used but for the most part guitars are "fitted and glued by workers hunched over workbenches." This affords Martin "extreme flexibility" and enables the company "to come up with a new design quickly and without tearing apart a production process" or making "a huge investment." For the 1-Series, "cost savings included switching to a type of lacquer that doesn’t require time-consuming polishing," for example. Martin was founded in 1822, and currently employs "about 575 workers, who make 52,000 guitars a year" at its Nazareth, Penn., factory. It also has a factory in Mexico that produces beginner guitars.