33ffea43b3115eba957356db0b41a6e4 It’s a turnaround story almost too good to be true. Gibson Guitar was down, and nearly out, in 1986 when Henry Juszkiewicz (MBA ’79) and David Berryman (MBA ’79) bought the legendary Nashville maker of acoustic and electric guitars. With renewed attention to product quality, acquisitions, and new markets, Gibson is back. Sales have doubled to more than $250 million since 2000. And the company is hiring another one hundred people to increase its handmade guitar output to four hundred a day, reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (November 30, 2003).

Juszkiewicz, chairman and CEO, credits the company’s turnaround in part to aging baby boomers who can afford to plunk down $1,000 or more for remakes of classic designs played by the world’s top professional musicians, including B.B. King and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page. The company made an attempt to automate production a while back and discovered that nothing beats old-fashioned handcraftsmanship.

But there is nothing old-fashioned about the new digital guitar that Gibson recently launched. It’s the biggest change in guitar design in more than sixty years, when the first guitars went electric. A patented computer chip in the instrument detects and processes the sound, sending it to a digital amplifier. To purists who protest, Juszkiewicz stands firm: “The electronics of the guitar are actually pretty bad by today’s standards. It’s time for an update.”

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