It was clear that the way forward for Fender was to take on the makers of knock-off guitars by introducing their own budget models. The big difference here was that Fender was not only intending to make inexpensive instruments for the American market, the company also intended to make high-quality guitars for the domestic Japanese market and to compete with the Japanese makers on their home turf. However, this was not the first time this approach to competing with low-cost foreign imports had been tried it could be argued that Gibson had done something similar with the Epiphone brand after moving production overseas in the late ‘60s after ceasing the manufacturing of Epiphone instruments in Kalamazoo, Michigan. This was a bold move essentially Fender would be creating its own copies and competing with itself. At the same time, Fender decided to take the fight against inexpensive imported copies to the source and confront the makers of copycat guitars on their home ground by manufacturing guitars in Japan. The new management team decided to fix Fender’s fortunes by using two different, but complementary approaches:įirst, they would tackle declining quality by significantly upgrading Fender’s California production facilities and implementing a new quality control program. We took for granted that they could make Stratocasters and Telecasters the way they used to make them, but we were wrong.” “It was starting to lose money, and at that point in time everybody hated Fender. “We were brought in to kind of turn the reputation of Fender around, and to get it so it was making money again,” Smith said, as quoted in “The Fender Book,” by Tony Bacon and Paul Day. The three knew that they had a tough job ahead of them.
The three executives, John McLaren, William “Bill” Schultz and Dan Smith, were music industry veterans who had previously worked for Yamaha Musical Instruments’ North American operation. In 1981, CBS brought in a new a new management team to turn Fender around. In fact, companies such as Tokai Gakki and FujiGen Gakki, which also made Ibanez guitars, were making instruments that were extremely close replicas of the Stratocasters and Telecasters made by Fender during its halcyon days of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.Īt the beginning of the 1980s, however, two significant and interrelated events occurred that propelled Fender’s transformation into a worldwide brand: the introduction of the Squier subsidiary and the creation of Fender Japan Ltd. Adding to Fender’s troubles was increased competition from inexpensive imported guitars, a large percentage of which were made in Japan at the time.Īnd while the American-made guitars were seen as getting progressively worse, the Japanese-made instruments were getting better. There was an often-justified perception of declining quality over the previous 15 years since Leo Fender had sold the company bearing his name to the U.S. It’s hard to imagine now, but at the end of the 1970s, the future looked bleak for Fender.
From its small beginnings making electric lap steels in Leo Fender’s California radio shop during the early 1940s, Fender has grown into a global brand that not only encompasses a multitude of musical instrument marques, including Squier, Gretsch, Guild, Jackson/ Charvel, Tacoma and SWR, but has even branched out into areas as disparate as car audio, in collaboration with Volkswagen, and retro styled tennis shoes.
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