With small ’shop boutique makers popping up on a seemingly daily basis, what’s different about Paoletti Guitars? We ask the company’s MD, Filippo Martini
Paoletti has been crafting unique guitars in Tuscany since 2005. Its founder, Fabrizio Paoletti, has a background in electrical engineering and automation, shares Filippo Martini, Paoletti’s managing director. “Guitar was a passion for him and still is today,” Filippo says. “That passion is also for the guitar as an instrument – its components, the way it plays, its sound; it fascinated him.”
Fabrizio started small, but now Paoletti’s operations are housed in a sizable modern three-storey building. “Where we are now – in the middle of Tuscany, very close to Florence – isn’t where the company was established,” says Filippo. “This is the third headquarters of Paoletti Guitars. The first one was like a garage; the second one was three times a garage,” he laughs. “We moved here about a year and a half ago into this new building because the company required space as the demand for the guitars was increasing.
“The aim of Fabrizio was to create a custom-shop reality,” he continues. “We were looking for a building that was able to store our machines because most – I would say 90 per cent – of the component parts are made here. So we needed more space for the dusty woodwork, more space for the painting process, and more space for the pickup manufacturing and so on. We now have 10 people working here split between the office side and production; most of those are in the artisan section and build the guitars, and they are able to cover all the processes of the guitar making. And Mr Paoletti is here every day, of course.”
Eighteen years on, Paoletti now makes around 500 guitars annually. “We have around 70 official Paoletti dealers worldwide but zero in Italy,” says Filippo, “so we do mainly export and in Italy we deal directly with the end-users. I would say 90 per cent of our guitars are exported. Our biggest markets are the USA, then the UK and Germany are at the same level; then we move to Japan, China, Australia, then other parts of Europe. France and Russia are good countries for our sales, too.”
Wood Choice
The feature that initially put Paoletti on the map was the unusual choice of body wood: chestnut, reclaimed from old wine barrels. “It ranges in age from 80 to 150 years old,” Filippo tell us. “In many wineries, the life of a wine barrel is a cycle. So after, maybe, eight to 10 years it is no longer any good for wine making, so it’s replaced, and we give them a new life. So the supply is, I’d say, endless. But it’s absolutely not free from the wineries – they want a lot of money for the barrels!
