Holmes, who played guitar in Nugent's band at the time and that St. (Note: Smith's entry on Wikipedia claims the guitar was given to Derek St. 'If you don’t fall in love with the guitar, you get your money back,' Smith told him. The early yearsĪs with any successful business venture, catching an early break was crucial, and in Smith's case it came when, according to Forbes, he managed to get backstage at a Ted Nugent gig with one of the guitar's he'd built and showed it to Nugent. If I opened the case of a guitar I’d built, people would gather in a crowd, he explained to Forbes. At the time Smith was both playing and making guitars, but was much more successful at the latter. That's still only a shade over a tenth of the turnovers of Fender and Gibson, but for a man who started building guitars in his bedroom only ten years earlier, it's pretty good going.Īccording to Forbes, Smith's first guitar was built from parts acquired from a violin shop in Washington DC. Far from just surviving, PRS Guitars has grown and prospered since Smith founded it in 1985, to the point where it turned over $43.5m in 2012. If he's right, an awful lot of customers have liked his guitars the best over the years. 'My company survives only if there are ten guitars on the wall of a music shop and the customer likes the one we made the best,' Smith explained to Forbes last year.
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