“It’s a challenge. But I would say that at no point was it ever not a challenge”: How Taylor is building quality acoustic guitars in the face of tariffs and uncertainty

As the CEO and president of Taylor Guitars, Andy Powers has seen his fair share of changes within the guitar manufacturing industry. As a guitar designer and life-long guitar aficionado, well, you could say Powers' life revolves around the instrument we all know and love – and that involves steering the Taylor ship into the future.

“I come from a guitar-making and playing background, not really so much of a business background,” Powers says in the new issue of Guitar World. “But I started building and playing guitars from a young age, so all I’d ever really done was build. A lot of my focus was on actually building the instrument itself.

“I still think about an instrument that might be interesting to a player – maybe an adaptation of a guitar we’re making now, maybe something totally new or something that might be an improvement to an existing guitar. I’ll go build those instruments by hand.”

Times have been challenging over the past year or so. The guitar and gear-making industry is not only grappling with global economic shifts, but also strained natural resources, the threats of full-blown trade wars, and an ever-changing tariff landscape.

As John Mlynczak, President and CEO of the National Association of Music Merchants [NAMM], told Guitar World last year, “these tariffs can be really devastating for our industry: it's not just the sudden costs that will have to be figured out by companies individually, but it's also the disruption of supply chains. It's the unpredictability, uncertainty, and the suddenness of the tariffs.”

So how have Powers and, in turn, Taylor Guitars, been navigating all this? “It is a challenge,” he admits. “But I would say that at no point was it ever not a challenge, right?

“Let’s say I went back a couple of hundred years and worked in Stradivari’s day; it’d be a real challenge to get great material,” he adds diplomatically. “Not so much because the materials aren’t there to be had, but just the logistics and transportation mean you’re gonna be working really close to home to get that piece of ebony for a fretboard. Man, that is really gonna be hard.

“So there’s a challenge there as you come into a more modern era where you face depleting resources. One of the challenges in procurement is actually sourcing the material and how it is harvested. So we’re working a lot closer, a lot deeper into the forest, and oftentimes looking at alternate structures for the future.”

As far as finding alternative, and perhaps, more eco-friendly structures, Powers asserts, “Whether that’s plantation-grown wood, whether that’s deliberately planting trees for future generations of instrument use, or whether it’s different forestry models altogether, like using reclaimed urban-harvested wood. There are all kinds of different ways we approach it, and they have their own unique challenges.”

For more from Powers and Taylor Guitars, pick up issue 601 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.