Mike Kurkdjian, the founder of Prestige Guitars, began by selling second-hand guitars online in high school
The colour of the semi-hollow electric guitar is called Blueberry Blast, the inlaid “Prestige” logo made of mother of pearl carefully cut into tiny pieces and glued into place — no stick-on decals for this North Vancouver guitar factory.
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It’s the 100th guitar produced since Mike Kurkdjian moved full production of his Prestige guitars to the North Shore from Korea a year ago, where his wood used to be shaped and painted before being shipped back to North Van to assemble, adding frets, pickups, and strings.
Not bad for a kid who started out doodling guitars in the margins of his school notebooks and casing pawn shops to check out the instruments.
“My family moved to Vancouver when I was 14 and the first thing I connected to as a new Vancouverite was a guitar,” Kurkdjian, now 43, said. “I didn’t have any friends, so I kind of took a few lessons and really fell into it, into that world of music.
“It was the ’90s, I grew up with the music of Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and it really took hold of me.”
Kurkdjian began an online business, while still in high school, selling guitars — his supportive parents not only didn’t mind him hanging out in pawn shops and music stores, they provided some of the up-front money to purchase inventory.
“I taught myself how to do coding, which nowadays is just a button-click, but at the time it was a little bit of a script,” he said. “I’d buy these guitars second-hand and sell them on eBay.”
It was a perfect meld of his two passions, guitars and marketing. By the time he was in Grade 12, he was grossing $200,000 a year.
He worked a bit for others, then 21 years ago founded Prestige Guitars, today one of only a handful of Canadian guitar manufacturers.
There’s a Guess Who song, Runnin’ Back to Saskatoon, where Burton Cummings sings about “hangin’ around gas stations … learnin’ ’bout tires.”
When you’re hangin’ around guitars, you learn about wood.
There are stacks and stacks of it in the wood library at the Prestige factory, a few blocks west of the Prestige showroom at 1332 Main St.
“Most of it comes from our own backyard, the Fraser Valley,” Kurkdjian said.
But not all of it.
Along with the Chilliwack flame, spalted, quilted and burl maple, there’s teak from Indonesia, Hawaiian koa, Honduran mahogany, and swamp ash from Muscle Shoals in Alabama.
“I met some guitar builders in the early 2000s, me myself having no knowledge of building, but in the marketing world I quickly learned how the different tone of wood affects sound, delved into that, and fell in love with that aspect of the business,” Kurkdjian said.
The factory is a woodworker’s dream, not just the piles upon piles of richly veined wood, but the drills and sanders, kiln and paint room, presses and band saws, the dust-extractor.
“You can see some of the machinery here is quite unique,” Kurkdjian said. “You can’t just walk into a Home Depot and buy this stuff.”
It employs four luthiers and a programmer (for a giant CNC — computer numerical control — machine), with another two employees at the showroom.
But don’t let Prestige Guitar’s relatively small scale fool you. Shania Twain, Slash and other big-name stars are fans.
“Those relationships happen over the course of our years of doing business,” Kurkdjian said.
“Todd has been an advocate of our company since the early years. As his star grew in the music world, we were lucky enough that he brought us along with the ride.”
In the studio, Slash would eye Kern’s signature guitar and eventually asked if he thought Prestige would mind commissioning a couple of unique guitars for his collection.
“Slash has his peculiarities, but in most cases he’s left it to us to think of stuff.”
“I get a call out of the blue one day. Shania was doing this stint (travelling town to town for a TV series) playing bare-bones acoustic sets,” Kurkdjian said. “Cory says, ‘We just finished filming the first episode and I’ve got good news and bad news.”
Kurkdjian prefers to get the bad news out of the way first.
“He said, ‘Well, you’re going to have to send us a second guitar, Shania just grabbed mine out of my hand in the first show and she won’t let it go, she’s really connected to it.”
