All Grown Up

PRS might well be 40 years old in 2025, but the SE guitars seem to be catching up with a 25th anniversary celebration planned for 2026. Where does the time go?

- Dave Burrluck

Creating a successful 40-year-old company is far from an easy thing to do, not least in the fickle, often fashion-led world of the electric guitar. But it won't be long before PRS's SE division hits its mid-20s, and in many ways it now seems like a guitar company within a guitar company-not least, of course, that the SEs have always been made 'offshore', originally in Korea and now primarily in Indonesia.

The SE acoustics and Hollowbodies are made by Cor-Tek in China.

But when the SE line kicked off with a single-guitar introduction in 2001, plenty of people thought it was the beginning of the end, the 'race to the bottom' in terms of price and probably quality, and the opposite of the high-level instruments that PRS had been producing in the USA since 1985. Even Paul Reed Smith was hesitant, and models with maple tops (albeit figured maple veneer over solid maple) weren't initially offered.

But 24 years on from the range's inception, the revenue that the SEs bring to PRS's total is now about 45 per cent, PRS's COO, Jack Higginbotham, tells us. “I'd say the two tides, if you like, have risen very equally between what we've done in the US and what we've done in SE," he says.

Bearing in mind the lower cost of the SE guitars (a quarter, often less, compared with the USA models), presumably to meet those revenue figures, a lot more SE guitars are made annually.

"Yes, by a factor of... a lot!" laughs Jack.

"Something like seven or eight times as many, obviously because of the different price points. It's a lot of units! Until you get used to thinking about it, it's pretty overwhelming when you start talking about 8,000 of these and 9,000 of those.

I remember a party we had back in the day [27 June 1986, The Night of The 1,000th Guitar]. It was a hard economical time in the world and we were like, 'Oh, this is a celebration of making 1,000 guitars.

What are we going to do now?""

Making It Work