If you've done any even casual browsing for guitars, you know there is a huge variety of prices you can find. All the way from "how can you even pay for the materials for that" imports for $150 to $25,000+ highly-customized master luthier builds made of Brazilian Rosewood and mammoth ivory, you're talking the same type of range from a Walmart 10-speed to a carbon fiber Tour de France competition bike; in price and quality. These are the extremes though, and I would say most mass-produced decent entry level axes run $350-600, with the next step up for hardware and overall build quality for mass production being roughly $700-2000. As production volumes are reduced and quality control increased, the factory guitars start to get into the $2000-$6000 range, with factory custom shops running around $8000+. Small-time luthiers often come in around $2500-$4000 for a standard handcrafted build, while extensive customization can easily push closer to $10k+. So where does all this come from? From my perspective I will focus on the small luthier and most applicable to handcrafted instruments. What precisely defines "handcrafted"? Well, that will be the topic of a future blog.
First: materials. A small luthier building a few to a few dozen guitars per year doesn't have the luxury of bulk order discounts for most things, so there's a lot of materials purchases that are basically made at retail. With high-quality woods and solid (not boutique) electronics and hardware, a premium build will often consume around $600-1200 in raw materials. This can be pushed toward the lower range by working with thick blocks of figured wood that can be resawn and worked into multiple tops instead of buying bookmatched and thicknessed blanks, but then the luthier needs access to more advanced and expensive equipment. Like so many other things in life, it comes down to tradeoff and balance. Personally I prefer to bookmatch my own tops from thicker billets, as it also offers precise control over the thickness for specific designs and can minimize waste.
While the tangibles like wood, hardware, and inlay material are the bulk of the consumables cost, there are many "invisible" materials costs involved as well: PPE (personal protective equipment, like respirators and cartridges, gloves, and goggles), glues and adhesives, finish sealers and lacquers, stains, solvents, rags, garbage bags, dust collector bags, all that fun stuff. And while I've alluded to it, I won't even get into the details of the tools and general workshop costs themselves!
The major "hidden" cost of a luthier-built guitar though, is time. Take a look at a rough process diagram for my builds that gives a basic run-down of the design and woodworking aspects of my builds:
All in all, for a fairly straightforward custom guitar build starting from seasoned lumber (meaning customer-driven design choices on woods, colors, scale length, etc. but not intricate inlay work or hardware machining) it's reasonable to assume in the range of 75-150 hours of actual focused labor time. Many of the operations involving adhesives and finishes also must be spaced out in time to allow proper curing and setup, so that the full process can't be compressed to much less than about 3 months, if there's no build queue.
To a large degree, a luthier-built custom guitar that isn't losing money for the builder will end up in a similar price range as the higher-end and custom-shop instruments produced by the big names, but the overhead costs go to different expenses. The luthier will pay more for material without large volume discounts, while the manufacturer will pay more in corporate expenses (administrative costs, lawyers, and regulatory expenses). The factory has fewer hours per guitar due to automation and assembly line manufacturing, but sees the capital investment and maintenance for dozens of machines costing hundreds of thousands of dollars each. The luthier can't reduce the hours-per instrument input much further, but a consequence is that he or she spends much more time working and inspecting each piece of the system in fine detail.
These types of overhead and production cost allocations may or may not have any bearing on your decision to buy a big name branded instrument vs. one from Dunham Guitars or any other smaller luthier, but it's never a bad idea to be informed about where your money is going and why things cost what they do. Whether it's simply dollars, where those dollars go and what they support, branding, supporting a mission, or some combination of all of them, I encourage you to always think about what investment offers the greatest total value to you and your own mission.
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