New leader takes over Taylor Guitars as founders step back

Years ago, Bob Taylor wrote a wish list describing the type of person he wanted to replace him as top designer for his namesake company.

They needed to be a self-taught guitar maker. A native San Diegan. A professional player. They couldn’t be older than 30 but still needed two decades of experience building instruments — and they should be a fundamentally good person.

He knew it was an impossible list. Then he met Andy Powers.

“This is why he’s not ‘one in a million,’” Taylor said in an interview. “He’s just ‘one.’”

On Monday, Taylor and co-founder Kurt Listug told employees they were stepping back as Taylor Guitar’s president and CEO to hand the reins to Powers.

The move is a significant shift for the East County powerhouse, which started nearly 50 years ago in Lemon Grove and now annually brings in around $150 million from guitars and other gear made in El Cajon and Tecate, Mexico.

Taylor Swift is a fan. So is Ben Harper, Jewel, Shawn Mendes. The list goes on.

“We love this region, we love the work that we do and we love that we get to continue doing it long into the future,” the 41-year-old Powers said in an interview.

Powers was born in La Jolla and grew up in Oceanside.

He tried to make his first guitar when he was about 7, he said. The wood shattered when he added strings.

Powers kept at it, and within five years he was repairing instruments for guitar shops all over the city. By the time he was 12 he’d made so much money the IRS came calling for their share in taxes, he said.

He eventually was creating custom instruments for professionals, museums and private collectors.

When he was still a teenager, he wanted to show one off to the folk musician Harvey Reid.

Powers and his dad bought tickets to Reid’s San Diego show. When they got to their seats, Powers recognized a man sitting nearby: Bob Taylor.

They talked guitars. He showed Taylor what he’d made. Powers remembered the guitar maker leaving impressed.

Taylor largely forgot the exchange.

But over the years he started hearing about some guy in Oceanside who was making killer instruments.

Around 2010 at a trade show, Taylor happened to see Powers play with San Diego icon Jason Mraz. (A more recent video of the two on stage shows Powers more than holding his own.)

Taylor asked Powers to hang out. They talked for eight hours.

Weeks later, Taylor was sitting at an El Cajon stop light. He thought about that list he’d shoved in a drawer. He thought about Powers. For crying out loud, the guy’s middle name was literally “Taylor,” after his mother.

Taylor made Powers an offer. You can keep your current gig building custom guitars and make a dozen people happy a year, he said. “Or you could take that same talent and make a couple hundred thousand people happy.”

“Checkmate,” Powers thought.

Powers joined the company in 2011 as its “master guitar builder.”

He oversaw several changes in how instruments were made, including an overhaul of an acoustic guitar’s internal structure. Known as V-Class Bracing, the redesign gave musicians more control over pitch and allowed notes to hit louder and longer.

Guitar World called the shift “revolutionary.”

Powers also impressed his bosses with how he learned other parts of the business, from marketing to human resources, and he was named co-owner in 2019.

Last year, the company became one of the few prominent instrument makers to shift ownership to its approximately 1,200 employees. At the time, leaders described the move as a way to keep the business independent.

The two founders eventually decided Powers should take both their jobs. His first day as president, CEO and chief designer was May 3.

Powers also has a music degree from UC San Diego. He lives in Carlsbad with his wife and three children: two boys and a girl, all under 12.

Taylor, 67, and Listug, 69, will continue as co-chairmen of the company’s four-person board and as “senior advisers.”

Taylor said he hopes to devote more time to other businesses, including his kitchenware maker Stella Falone. Taylor Guitars has long pushed for ways to improve their supply chain, from recycling urban lumber to replanting trees in Cameroon, and the former president hopes to keep turning discarded wood into new products.

Letting Powers take the lead fills Taylor with relief.

“I felt my company could survive me,” he said.