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PROVO — A group of students with a shared love of music created a hybrid guitar from carbon fiber and wood to make it more durable for travel and camping.
Princeton University graduate Adam Klosowiak said he learned to play guitar in 2013, using a small travel guitar. However, he said it wasn’t very comfortable and the small size made it hard to learn how to play. He said his brother Ian has been playing guitar for more than 10 years, and as a mechanical engineering student at Brigham Young University, Ian Klosowiak saw it as an opportunity to create a better, more durable travel guitar.
“One of the main reasons why I built this guitar and we are doing this company is because we know music has changed our lives and we want it to change other people’s (lives) by having a guitar that you can more accessibly and more comfortably take with you on family vacations, weekend trips,” Ian Klosowiak said. “It’s much easier with this guitar.”
Ian Klosowiak made his first prototype for a class project at BYU in March 2014 and received a lot of positive feedback about it, Adam Klosowiak said. The brothers saw a business opportunity and Klos Guitars was founded in January 2015.
“The first four letters of our last name inspired the name of the guitar company,” Adam Klosowiak said. “We thought we would use it because of the pun with the word ‘close.’ Keep it close wherever you go.”
The Klosowiaks recruited Ian’s engineering classmates Jacob Sheffield, Sam Carmack and Perry Burton to help them manufacture the guitars. The body of the guitars are created from carbon fiber to make them more durable and the necks are made of mahogany and rosewood to give the guitarist the familiar feel of wood.
“When you are going traveling, you want a material that you won’t really worry about it getting dinged up,” Adam Klosowiak said. “You just don’t have to worry about it as much. When you go camping, you do want to be carefree. You don’t want to be fretting over whether the guitar you brought is going to get damaged.”
The travel guitars are slightly smaller than a 3/4 guitar body with a standard neck size and about 40 percent lighter, Adam Klosowiak said. The men began entering the guitar prototype into college competitions and were named as finalists in BYU’s Business Model Competition in March, winning $1,000.
They then launched the project on Kickstarter in May to help gather funding for the materials to build the travel guitars. The Klos Guitars were selected as a Kickstarter Staff Pick, and as of Tuesday, had raised more than $18,000.
Jacob Sheffield/Klos Guitars
