Gibson Guitars. Never Meet Your Heros - (Not if, Like Mine, Your Hero was Gibson Guitars)

This is a video I did about 8 years ago when Gibson were going bankrupt - I hoped things would improve - but to my knowledge they never did (based on customer feedback, youtube and forum community chat).

 

I’ve been selling guitars for over 30 years. I don’t say this lightly, and I don’t say it for clicks: I find Gibson an awful company to deal with, and it’s why I would never support or stock them.

The video below explains why. I filmed it in March 2018 when Gibson’s CEO Henry Juszkiewicz was publicly blaming players and dealers for Gibson’s impending bankruptcy. I’d just had enough of watching him blame everyone around him.

It starts with the product

By 2015 I thought Gibson would already go bust. They forced robot tuners onto every single Les Paul that year. Technology that everyone knew would be obsolete in two years, with no clarity on spares.

Then there was the Les Paul Studio with that headstock script and a hologram of Les Paul on the back of the neck. Then the £2,999 Standards in hot pink fade, cobalt fade, blood orange fade. I’m a traditionalist in many ways, but this wasn’t innovation — it was gimmick on top of gimmick while the core quality wasn’t there.

For 20 years I’d watched the quality slide while the legacy was used to sell the guitars.

It continues with how dealers were treated

Henry said dealers were the problem because they didn’t provide places to try guitars. My experience was the opposite: he’d destroyed dealers for years.

Retrospective discounting focused everyone on high-volume, low-margin sales. That removes all focus on quality, setup, advice and care. Proper specialist stores who set guitars up properly and guide players were forced out of the business model years ago — people like me.

Add musicyo.com — Gibson-owned direct sales online from 2000 — and later Amazon and direct selling. You can’t tell retailers you support them while undercutting them direct.

The broken guitar issue

This is the part that finished me. Before my breakdown I rang Trading Standards to ask what could be done.

They explained the chain problem: as long as the manufacturer tells the distributor of a fault, and the distributor tells the retailer, there’s no route back to the top. Once it fans out to hundreds of tiny separate retailers with their own responsibilities, you can’t trust what happens.

My view at the time: Gibson was selling broken guitars into the trade as standard practice, presuming retailers would repair them or sell them as spares. There was no vetting for who had a proper workshop. And show me the adverts — where were all the adverts for “repaired broken neck Gibson, now for sale”? They didn’t exist. That tells you everything.

You can’t set the whole system up to profit from defective stock and then blame retailers for taking the route of least resistance.

Why I walked away

So no — it wasn’t players. It wasn’t dealers who cared.

In my view it was crap guitars for 20 years, a workforce that by its own reviews hated working there, and total contempt for the specialist trade.

Gibson survived — as I said in the video it would — but it survived to be bought. I hoped it would be bought by someone who gives a damn about heritage, playability and functionality.

My position hasn’t changed. Everything we do at Richards Guitars is about quality, not artificially generated mass hysteria. Purity of wood, tone and craftsmanship. Proper setups. Honest advice in a quiet room, not beat-trading and hype.

Watch the original video below in full — it’s raw, it’s from the heart, and I needed to get it off my chest so I could sleep that night. If you want to hear what a properly set-up, honestly-sourced guitar actually sounds like, book a private appointment at

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And every guitar we sell plants a tree in the Forest of Richards Guitars.

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Questions & Answers About Why I Dont Sell Gibson Guitars & Would Never Recommend Them.

Q: Why doesn’t Richards Guitars stock Gibson guitars? A: Richards’ stated view is that Gibson under Henry Juszkiewicz produced poor quality guitars for 20 years, treated specialist dealers with contempt, and created a sales model based on volume not quality. That’s why he walked away and would never support them.

Q: What did Richards think of the 2015 Gibson Les Paul models? A: He thought they would bankrupt the company. He criticised the child-like headstock script, the Les Paul hologram on the neck, and robot machine heads forced on every 2015 Les Paul which would quickly become obsolete with no spare parts supply.

Q: What was Richards’ view on Gibson’s finishes and pricing? A: He called the late Henry-era range absolutely awful — citing £2,999 Les Paul Standards in hot pink fade, cobalt fade and blood orange fade, and SGs in bright blue and hot pink fade.

Q: Did Richards blame dealers for Gibson’s bankruptcy? A: No — the opposite. He argues Henry blamed players and dealers, but Henry himself destroyed specialist dealers through beat-trading, retrospective discounting, high-volume low-margin targets, and direct sales via musicyo.com, Amazon and direct.

Q: What is the broken Gibson guitar claim? A: Richards’ experience was that Gibson shipped guitars with broken necks into the UK trade as standard practice. He says Trading Standards told him there was no recourse as long as each link in the chain informed the next, and there was no vetting that retailers had workshops to repair them properly.

Q: What does Richards say about Gibson employees? A: Citing Glassdoor reviews at the time with around 15% approval for the CEO, he says the workforce was miserable, with reviews describing safety violations and calling for the company to be sold.

Q: Does this video refer to Gibson today? A: No. This video was filmed in March 2018 under CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, before Gibson’s 2018 bankruptcy and change of ownership. It explains Richards’ historic experience and why he formed his long-standing position not to stock Gibson.

Want me to tighten this into an SEO version with chapters and image alt-text prompts for your web team, like we did for Yellow vs Deluxe?