Born during a shortage of guitars in former communist-ruled Czechoslovakia, the Furch family company is now selling instruments to global stars out of its workshop in a former mill.
American guitar virtuoso Al Di Meola, songwriter Suzanne Vega and Per Gessle of the Swedish rock duo Roxette all play Furch guitars.
It is a far cry from the company’s early days.
“I had a little green notebook and I took down the names of buyers. It kept growing nicely, but it was also dangerous because private business was illegal then,” company founder Frantisek Furch told reporters.
The 62-year-old former metalworker sold his first guitar in 1981, when then-Czechoslovakia had eight more years to live under Moscow’s rule.
He risked up to 10 years in prison until 1988, when the government allowed private businesses.
A year later, the communist regime fell and Czechoslovakia went on to split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993.
Furch, who made a guitar in two months at first, started to grow. In 1990, he already had seven employees. He makes only acoustic guitars, mainly from imported wood.
He also made his first foreign sale — a mandolin — that year.
Now, the company has more than 60 employees and churns out 7,000 guitars annually, selling to Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Scandinavia and the US, as well as to the Czech market.
“We are quite different from the others,” said Furch chief executive officer Petr Furch, Frantisek Furch’s son.
“Our guitars comprise lots of know-how you can’t see. There are dozens to hundreds of details whose combination makes the sound and the quality of the product,” Petr Furch said.
The company supplies guitars to many musicians in the Czech Republic, including the award-winning singer and songwriter Thom Artway.
“I love the story of the family, that’s simply fascinating,” Artway told reporters.
“And then, the guitar understands the tones I want to play, it knows how I want to play them and it simply does what I want,” he said.
The company has just opened a distribution center in the US music hub of Nashville, Tennessee, and Frantisek Furch relishes the thought of top artists playing his guitars.
“I’m happy that the offers come from their side, not from ours, and that we have so many personalities among our customers,” he said, before adding: “I guess Eric Clapton could show up too some day.”
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
CONFIDENCE BOOSTER: ’After parkour ... you dare to do a lot of things that you think only young people can do,’ a 67-year-old parkour enthusiast said In a corner of suburban Singapore, Betty Boon vaults a guardrail, crawls underneath a slide, executes forward shoulder rolls and scales a steep slope, finishing the course to applause. “Good job,” the 69-year-old’s coach cheers. This is “geriatric parkour,” where about 20 retirees learned to tackle a series of relatively demanding exercises, building their agility and enjoying a sense of camaraderie. Boon, an upbeat grandmother, said learning parkour has aided her confidence and independence as she ages. “When you’re weak, you will be dependent on someone,” she said after sweating it out with her parkour classmates in suburban Toa Payoh,
Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen (高兟), famous for making provocative satirical sculptures of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東), was tried on Monday over accusations of “defaming national heroes and martyrs,” his wife and a rights group said. Gao, 69, who was detained in 2024 during a visit from the US, faces a maximum three-year prison sentence, said his wife, Zhao Yaliang (趙雅良), and Shane Yi, a researcher at the Chinese Human Rights Defenders group which operates outside the nation. The closed-door, one-day trial took place at Sanhe City People’s Court in Hebei Province neighboring the capital, Beijing, and ended without a
‘TOXIC CLIMATE’: ‘I don’t really recognize Labour anymore... The idea that you can implement far-right ideas in order to stop the far right is nonsense,’ a protester said Tens of thousands of people on Saturday marched through central London to protest against the far right, weeks ahead of local elections and six months after Britain saw one of its largest far-right demonstrations. Organized by hundreds of civic groups, including trade unions, anti-racism campaigners and Muslim representative bodies, Saturday’s Together Alliance event was billed as the biggest in UK history to counter right-wing extremism. A separate pro-Palestinian march had also converged with the main rally. While organizers claimed 500,000 had turned out in total, the police gave a figure of about 50,000. Protesters carrying placards with slogans such as
RSS