We were lucky to catch up with John Esterly recently and have shared our conversation below.
John, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?
My design process is typically qualitative. I have an idea what sound profile I’m interested in creating, and use that as my basis for the physical product. If I like the guitar tone on a certain song, I might look at what types of effects the musician used to get there and use that as a jumping off point. Early prototypes are built using through-hole components and parts might be socketed for easy swap. In some cases, portions of the circuit might be wired to a toggle switch for testing purposes – sometimes these toggles make it to production. Once the circuit is ironed out, I convert non-critical components to surface mount parts to speed assembly of the final product. Art is usually the last thing I do. Once the product is ready to go, I send it out to several demo artists and coordinate a drop.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
One thing that strikes me about the guitar gear community is how open most people are with their time and expertise. I’ve had some established brands give me guidance on everything from pricing to sourcing to design, and I always try to pay that forward. It’s been my experience that we’re much more collaborative than we are competitive.
Have you ever had to pivot?
Like many businesses, the Covid-19 pandemic was a mixed bag. I had made a conscious decision to retool my design philosophy and product lineup in late 2019 and was in the midst of that when the pandemic hit. Parts became difficult to source and many of our long-time vendors paused or left the market. The other side of the story is that sales were good during this period. People were home with time to find a hobby and pedals sold well. This led to a period in time where we were designing based on what we could get our hands on and lots of new friends entered the market.
How’d you meet your business partner?
My business partner actually reached out to me wanting to intern. The first thing he did was sort diodes for a pedal design I was working on. Since then, he’s designed his own pedals and helps a lot with branding and media content. We’ve found a good balance.
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