Garrison Guitars - Text Version

Chris Griffiths, President and CEO, Garrison Guitars

CHRIS GRIFFITHS: Garrison Guitars is based in St. Johns, Newfoundland, on the east coast of Canada, the oldest city in North America. And we have a 20,000 square foot factory here that's mass producing 50 acoustic guitars a day using a patented technology called the Griffiths Active Bracing System. The company has been in operation for about two years, but I've been working on that technology for, I guess, a total of eight years since the very beginning.

And what it is, is that we've combined a lot of the internal reinforcement braces on the inside of an acoustic guitar into a single unit using a glass fibre composite, as opposed to the typical wood bracing. I didn't want to just start another guitar factory. I wanted to, even though the market was growing by double digits, I wanted to do something really different. I wanted to have a strategic advantage that came as close as possible to guaranteeing success. And that's when you start thinking outside the box.

Coming up with an innovation and trying to take that idea and commercialize it requires an awful lot of resources. And some of the resources that I used during the development, pre-commercialization stage, included the National Research Council who put me in touch with different parties right across Canada who might have some knowledge towards injection molding, which was part of my concept.

I also became a client of the Genesis Centre, which is partially funded by the university here in Newfoundland. And it's basically an incubator for high tech, high growth companies. And what they did was provide me with office space, clercial staff that I could share with other businesses in the incubator, and a more official place to run my, almost like a business, even though I hadn't gotten started yet. They helped me with consulting services, helped me put my business plan together, helped me...introduced me to venture capitalists and private investors, as well.

DAVID KING: Well, Chris is an entrepreneur, of course, had already successfully run a retail operation. And when he came and presented to our Board, he clearly had the qualities we were looking for in entrepreneurs – and he had a vision of where he wanted to take that company that was international, and export market oriented, and new technology.

The incubation process is, of course, where we work with entrepreneurs and try to take them more quickly to the market. So, we're looking for entrepreneurs that had the capability to begin with, and, certainly, we saw that in Chris. And we worked with him to take his strengths in marketing and add to that the financial aspects, the actual manufacturing capacity to build the guitars in Newfoundland and produce a really world class company.

CHRIS GRIFFITHS: I think innovation, for me personally, is not, you know, coming up with the Griffiths Active Bracing System and successfully applying for patents and then building a company. You don't start and finish innovation. You start it and you never complete it. And I think what I am most proud of, as far as how we've become an innovative company, is not the patents that we've achieved, but the attitude, and culture of innovation that we have in our accounting department and in our marketing department and out in the plant floor.

ANDY FISHER: We started out very much as a technology-based group. The first people we brought on were technologists to support the design processes. And we walked through how one might take this brilliant concept, which had never been put into production before, and actually get something that could be... could realize the benefits of that. Which is difficult because, although it makes a lot of things simpler in the guitar manufacturing process, it also adds another level of accuracy, so we have to make things a lot more accurate than other guitar manufacturers have to do them in order to make our guitars come together the way they need to.

One of the things that we did is, we visited other guitar factories and looked at traditional building, but we tried to steer clear of thinking that's the only way to do things. So we went to machine tool shows, nothing to do with guitar manufacturing.... everything we could to see how we could possibly tackle some of the challenges that came up. We looked at it as a manufacturing challenge rather than one of luthery or one of guitar building.

There's a number of things in the plant and they would all develop with the seat of an idea, and a great deal of discussion between people who had diverse starting points, and then a resolution – this is the technology that we're going to try to make work in this case.

CHRIS GRIFFITHS: We're very lucky that the market has accepted our product, to the point where we have a stack of purchase orders that looks like this, and a production capacity that looks like this. Myself, and my investors, and my co-workers are very anxious to try and level that off, because that's in many ways, that's money waiting to happen. But not at the sacrifice of quality. Not at a speed that causes too much chaos, or that we're not comfortable with. It's important for us to have the discipline to say that, you know, we're not just here to build as many guitars as humanly possible – that was never the goal of the company. The goal was to bring quality into a better price point.

We're really passionate about building Garrison Guitars as a brand to be associated with innovative technology, in an industry that is entrenched in tradition...and quality, so that Garrison Guitars becomes an obvious choice for a customer who'se worked hard for their disposable income. It becomes an obvious value choice for them to spend their hard earned money. So that's what we're going to focus on in the short term, and once we achieve that new goal, the sky's the limit as to where we're going to grow from there.

END