To mark its 50th anniversary, D'Addario, the guitar string giant, is pulling out all the stops with a multi-pronged celebration. From a video series delving into the company's history to a limited-edition string and merchandise release, D'Addario is honoring its legacy and looking towards the future. Despite facing challenges in the declining musical instrument market, the company remains optimistic about its continued growth.
, and transferred them to his Fender. The plan worked until one of the strings broke — and Entwistle had to buy two more Danelectros just for the strings. , who built a multimillion-dollar guitar-strings empire on the foundation of his late father John’s early innovations, tells this story in a 50th-anniversary video series called Jim’s Corner.
D’Addario acknowledges the company faces industry headwinds — the musical-instrument business, he says, is declining 2%-3% per year, which affects a company whose guitar strings make up 45% of its business. “People buy a guitar for their kid, and if he doesn’t play, they don’t put it in the attic or the basement anymore. They put it on eBay,” D’Addario says. “Everything a dealer sells, he’s going to compete with that instrument.
But mostly, D’Addario is upbeat, describing the guitar pedalboards his company has spent two years designing, pedalboard power supplies containing USB batteries and coated strings that resist “moisture, perspiration, skin, debris.” Says D’Addario, “We keep an ideation list for each brand. We’ll have crazy things on there. When we have bandwidth, we’ll throw one on the active-project list.
In the early 1990s, a package of strings had an envelope for each of the six strings — a paper envelope for each one, identified for each note, in a vinyl pouch with a fancy label. So there was a minimum of eight pieces of packaging; sometimes there was a little advertisement as well. My daughter Amy was in high school, and they were studying environmental friendliness and recycling and packaging, and I was changing my strings on the bed and I had all this garbage when I was done.
So it got me thinking. I came up with a system of color-coding the ball end on the string a different color, then coiling those together in one corrosion-resistant plastic bag and having them color-coded, so the silver one is this note and the brass one is this note. It eliminated 75% of the packaging. Since that time, we’ve saved billions of trees and millions of pounds of carbon not released into the atmosphere. That was one of the things that distinguished our strings.
D'addario Guitar Strings Anniversary Music Industry Business Success
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