The Bigger Picture
We catch up with Relish CEO and co-founder Silvan Küng in Switzerland as the company’s new guitar brings its innovative style to the mainstream market
Trinity by Relish is quite a departure from your Swiss-made guitars…
“This is a start of a new chapter in my company’s history. Our intention has always been to inspire musicians and I’ve finally achieved a way of being able to approach more musicians. I struggled with how to make a compromise with the instruments we have built here in Switzerland in comparison with having a new partner that is capable of reducing my costs on the guitars we make.”
How did you end up with Cor-Tek making the new guitar?
“After approaching 16 different suppliers I went with the best one. I personally met the president of the company – I gave him some Swiss chocolate! – and explained my vision of inspiring musicians but not enough of them if I’m just making guitars in Switzerland. I needed a new partnership to make that happen. So he agreed, but you know our numbers are very low compared with other companies he makes guitars for. For us, it’s huge! Our first batch is 500 guitars and it’s been amazing how this collaboration has worked.”
This new experience of building guitars must be very different to the small operation you have in Switzerland…
“As I found during this process, I was impressed with how well these people are trained and very passionate about building guitars, especially that we are producing our guitars in Cor-Tek’s premium manufacturing facility; we pay more money, but it’s worth doing and they have been so great to collaborate with. It’s very much a joint venture. We still have the pickup swapping feature, which is injection moulded here in Switzerland, and we do all the soldering and pre-manufacturing and then send that to them and they will implement them into the build. It’s a good way of keeping our quality but with this new collaboration.”
The pickups are made in Indonesia, too?
“Yes, our pickups were originally made by Good Tone in Switzerland – that was very early on in our first year – but as we scaled up the numbers they were not able to produce them, so we have used various suppliers. The pickups for Trinity are made by PSE Pickups, a border company for the whole Cor-Tek group, actually. They make a lot of pickups; I believe it’s between 150,000 and 200,000 a month.”
Along with the pickup swapping you’ve retained the outline of your original Swiss guitars. Were you tempted to design something more, ahem, classic-looking?
“That’s a very good question and it was the path I was struggling with. I didn’t want to replicate existing, known designs – many other suppliers are doing their own versions of, for example, a Telecaster or Strat or whatever. I know there is a huge potential to do that – just to change the lines here and there so you have a kind-of-like-Tele or whatever. But, honesty, I didn’t want to lose the design approach of what we have already built. I want it to be visible that the Relish guitar is something new and customers that buy a Relish are making a statement: this is a new guitar, a new concept and it’s not only the innovation that is inside, it’s also the look of it. I know that with these design lines you might lose customers, but you also have the potential to win customers because they might already have that kind-of-a-Tele guitar.
“In the future there might be a discussion of licensing the pickup-swapping solution with other brands to implement.That would be the
“In future we might look at licensing the pickup-swapping solution to other brands” Silvan Küng
biggest approach I could achieve so that other brands are jumping onboard and the customer is not limited any more. I know that’s a big wish, but I think I’ve proved that a solidbody construction is capable of utilising that [pickup swapping] solution. I think the Trinity is the first step into that field. So whatever may come in the future we will be open-minded in terms of potentially licensing the design to other brands.”
The new Trinity by Relish guitar should be ready to ship right now, correct?
“I will start shipping guitars at the start of July so they will be available, yes – so long as we still have stock. And although we have an OEM supplier we check all the guitars here in Switzerland before we ship them; they will all be shipped from here.”