 John Mayer isn’t the only one “waiting on the world to change.” Tish Ciravolo has been working to change the landscape of the music industry since starting the first girl guitar company, Daisy Rock Guitars, in 2000. She came upon her mission in life years before that, however, as a working bass player in a male-dominated industry.
“I was playing bass in rock bands in the 1980s. I went to buy my very first bass and it was a horrible experience. The guys I bought the bass from talked me into a bass that they thought would be great for me, which meant that I left and took the bass home that night and I brought it back the next day,” said Ciravolo. “[I said] I need something that’s smaller and easier to hold and better for me to be able to play.
“That was my introduction into the MI industry and that it’s very male dominated,” she continued. “There were no girls at the store who could help me. There were no girl instruments on the wall for me to buy.”
The Girly Show
After Ciravolo came up with her business model, armed with an initial sketch from one of her two daughters, she was faced with heading a company for the first time. “I’d done a lot of different assistant work. I’d been manager of a couple of restaurants. It’s not like I had started my own company before and been successful with it, but I was a real go-getter type of person,” she recalled. Where Ciravolo got most of her training was working alongside her husband, who is president of Schecter Guitars.
“You know, when I was working at Schecter, [it] was a mere six-person operation. So we were people who wore all the hats. We weren’t just doing one thing. We did one of 20 different things to make the company run,” said Ciravolo. “I think being thrust in that environment where I had to wear a lot of different hats, doing anything that needed to be done, taught me how to do it. I kind of watched how [my husband] ran the guitar business side. I learned from him how to deal with factories and how to deal with new products; how to deal with salespeople and how to deal with the dealers.”
Daisy Rock is a company made to empower female players, but that doesn’t mean Ciravolo is in charge of a gaggle of women. “I have an amazing guy who does sales and he’s a guy! I don’t look at it like I have to have a girl or I have to have a guy. I’m just looking for talent. They can be green as long as they have a lot of drive, or they can be very seasoned as long as they’re into what we’re doing,” she said.
“But at the same time,” she continued, “I think it’s really important to have a girl for my artist relations gig. We get these girls in here who are 10, 11, and 12, and it’s really awesome to have a girl who can sit down and have a conversation with them. You get a girl who’s that young and they’re getting intimidated really easily by having a guy telling them about guitars. So I want it to be the most friendly and family-oriented environment.”
Acceptance Rate
Despite how far she and the industry have come, Ciravolo still finds herself being treated differently than her male counterparts, which she’s learned to be more amused about.
“It’s kind of funny because I’ll have guys who work for me and they’ll not want to tell me everything that’s going on because I’m a girl,” she said. “Don’t talk to me a certain way because I’m a girl; just tell me what’s going on. I can deal with it; I can handle it. I’d like to sometimes think I’m a delicate flower, but I’m not.” [Laughs]
That communication gap is something that’s existed throughout the life of Daisy Rock Guitars, even going back to Ciravolo’s first NAMM show in 2001.
“The response from people was they loved the idea or they hated it. There were very few people in the middle of that feeling,” said Ciravolo. “All the girls were like, ‘That is so cool. I can’t believe someone finally did this.’ And then all the guys would be like, ‘Well why do they need their own guitar?’ [Laughs] ‘Why does it have to be pink?’
“I was really selling [the] concept to dealers,” she continued, “[that] they were not reaching all the potential buyers they could in their cities. Daisy Rock doesn’t take away from sales from other guitar companies in stores. We are an add-on business. We are stopping the girl in this industry who would normally not come in your store.”
Blazing a Trail
Flash forward to 2008 and not only is Ciravolo’s idea a success but she is considered a pioneer in the industry. Daisy Rock was even inducted into the Museum of Making Music in 2006, an achievement Ciravolo considers one of the highlights of her career.
“I really felt after I got inducted like I’d planted the flag. OK yes, everybody gets it. Everybody takes it seriously and everybody knows that it changed the music industry. And then I cried.” [Laughs]
That’s not to say she feels her work is done by any means. “I feel like we’ve done so much and yet there’s so much more to do. I just don’t know if, in my lifetime, I will live to see it all happen,” said Ciravolo. “I think I’ve started something in my daughters’ lifetime so they will think that it is so normal for a girl to play a guitar in a band and be on TV and be on the charts. I think I’ll feel it when I tell my grandkids stories about my experiences and they think I’m lying.”
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