Karen:
Today's guest leads one of the most iconic legacy brands in the
world, Martin Guitar, and he leads with heart, creativity, and a deep love for
the craft. Thomas Ripsam is the CEO of C.F. Martin & Co., a family business
that's been making guitars since 1833, revered by musicians across the globe.
Thomas is a leader who understands that to guide a legacy brand, you must both
honor its history and dream boldly into its future. What I admire most is that
Thomas is not only a leader, he is an artist. Thomas, welcome to Always
Lifting.

Thomas:
Hey Karen, thanks for having me.

Karen:
You're a passionate artist, you're a guitar player, and now you're
the CEO of Martin Guitar, a legendary guitar company. How did you find yourself
on this path?

Thomas:
I always say when I was born, I already knew one day I'd be the CEO
of Martin Guitar. No — I grew up in Germany and come from a pretty humble home.
Money was tight. My parents struggled a little with their marriage. But I had
several outlets from my childhood that kept me sane and opened my interest in
experiencing the world: music, art, reading, the outdoors, nature. The trigger
for music was my dad's singles collection — one of them was Elvis Presley
playing his Martin acoustic, with Scotty Moore on electric. From then on, music
became really important, and guitar became my favorite instrument. I started
learning in my teens.

But growing up in a humble
home, I knew I had to earn my living. So I did an education in business — two
years in England, two years in Germany — and then had a 25-year career in
consulting, doing strategy work with consumer goods, retail, and tech companies
all over the world. In parallel, my music passion was always the other big part
of me, along with my passion for art. Before Martin, there was a time in my
life when I thought more actively about it: I love business and the problem
solving that comes with consulting, but I also love the creative side, and I
want to find something where I can bring those two things together.

And then magically the Martin
opportunity surfaced. It's literally like bringing my two halves together into
what I do now. The third piece, other than it being music and being business,
was that I love working with companies where people and culture are the center
of everything — and that's exactly what Martin is. It's all the people. It's
incredibly humbling to be part of Martin in this role as the first outside CEO.
When I think about it, I have to pinch myself.

Karen:
You're the first non-family CEO for Martin Guitar.

Thomas:
Martin is a sixth-generation, still family-owned business, almost
200 years old now, originally from Germany but set up in the US in 1833 —
always run by family members. In 2021, Chris Martin, who had been CEO for 35
years and was the primary owner, announced his retirement and moved into the
executive chairman role. They have a daughter, but she wasn't old enough to
take over, so they decided to bring somebody in from the outside.

Thomas:
At Martin we have this phrase, and I think it's a beautiful phrase:
one foot in the past, one foot in the future. The past is such an important
part of what the brand is all about. But if you don't stay in today and think
about tomorrow, you're not going to stay relevant and you're not going to be
successful. In my consulting career I worked with a lot of companies that had a
long history, and I've seen different paths — some lost their way, others
continuously evolved. So I think about that phrase every day, because we can't
lose either one without risking the special sauce, and also the success Martin
has experienced across almost 200 years, with some booms and some tough times,
but always able to move with the times. Last year we had the best year in the
history of the company.

Karen:
My husband is a furniture maker, and he wanted me to ask whether you
have fixtures older than he is that you're still using.

Thomas:
Martin really started with handcrafted guitars involving basic
tools, fixtures and things like that. But over 200 years, as the craftsmanship
evolved, the company always maintained the human touch while also looking at
ways to improve how we manufacture, and how we do it at scale. To give you an
idea, the company manufactures around 130,000 to 140,000 guitars every year,
across two locations — one in Nazareth and one in northern Mexico. To make that
quantity at that quality, it's just hard to do solely with people's hands.
Technology has been part of Martin's thinking for a long time — way before me
they introduced robotics for polishing. We have CNC machines, a sawmill, and a
robot that runs around the factory delivering parts, which you'll usually see
if you take a tour. We still have some old fixtures too — there's a drying
wheel in our machine room we still use sometimes for gluing backs together.

Technology for us isn't
categorically about replacing human work. The goal is to think about the parts
of the process that are highly repetitive, or difficult ergonomically, or where
efficiency really matters — and then being very clear about where the human
touch makes the difference. In our guitars, the inlays in the headstock, the
fingerboard, the rosette around the sound hole — a lot of those are still
inlaid by hand.

Thomas:
This guitar is actually one that I designed. Chris Martin introduced
a series when he was still CEO — a CEO-designed guitar that lets the CEO
experiment with different materials, shapes, aesthetics, sometimes different
sounds. When I became CEO, he basically said, well, you're the CEO now, why
don't you have a go at it. My first one was pretty traditional, with a lot of
vintage features. This is my second, which we introduced earlier this year at
the NAMM trade show, and for this one I wanted to do something completely
different.

Color, first. We don't really
use a lot of colors except through our custom shop. I think color is an
incredible source of character for a guitar. I knew it should be blue, because
I love the color, but it had to look classy and good. We experimented a lot and
eventually came up with this one — it's called New Horizons Burst, with the
shading toward the edges. I also wanted to experiment with different materials,
so this is German white oak. You don't see a lot of guitars out there with oak,
and as a German, that was a nice touch. With oak, that body style, and that
size, we didn't quite know how it would actually sound — but it sounds really
good.

It's the CEO 11, because it's
the eleventh in the series, limited to 1,111, and each one is hand signed by
me. And there's always the question of what's the story about the guitar. I
started doing research into the number 11, and found that in numerology there's
a concept of master numbers that carry special meaning. The number 11 stands
for inspiration and enlightenment. So we used an image that's actually the
Buddhist symbol for the path to enlightenment. And obviously it all points to
Martin — so Martin, in the end, leads to enlightenment.

Karen:
You've also produced your own album. How does that play into all of
this?

Thomas:
Creating music, songwriting, and recording is something I've loved
for a long time. It's connected to the instruments, but it's on its own
journey. On the New Horizons album, there's actually no acoustic guitar on it,
and that was intentional, because the other albums were heavily acoustic-guitar
influenced. What I love about creativity and art and music is that you can do
whatever you want — but for me, every new thing has to have some intention
behind it. That's where it gets a little hard, because with everything at your
disposal nowadays you literally can do anything. How do you pick something
that's meaningful to you, and hopefully to other people as well?

The theme behind that album was
thinking about it as music for a movie — a movie about a journey somebody goes
through. The first song is called Farewell, which is the idea of a departure. I
didn't want to prescribe what the movie would be about, other than there's a
journey aspect. So whoever listens to it should listen thinking about a
journey, maybe one of their own, and think about different parts or stops along
the way. That's what made these songs come to life for me.

Thomas:
I definitely carve out time for the things that matter to me. My
family matters a ton — my wife Kathleen and I have been married 30 years, we
have four kids, multicultural backgrounds. Music, of course, is an important
part. Reading. And I've learned that if you don't make the time, there are
always enough reasons it won't happen. The work as a CEO is often very, very
intense, and you do need something that gives you the mental balance. So I
meditate. I use art or music, like painting — to me it's like meditation,
because it draws you into something that in the end is actually quite simple.

It's mainly breathing. I use an
app called Calm, every day, and I've never really cracked the intent of not
thinking or just letting things go — but it's not a lot of time, and it's time
I always look forward to. It's my time. I always do it in the morning. It's
actually the first thing I do when I get up, and it sets you up for the day.

Thomas:
Thinking about creating music and business, there's a link — for
both, you need a few things for it to work. You need a vision. You need to
break that vision down into lots of details, but those details all have to
connect back to the vision. You have to execute. But I think you also have to
know what good looks like. And if you look at today versus three or five years
from now, good will look very different. As a leader you need to know that and
inspire your leadership team to have that mindset. That's work. It doesn't come
naturally.

If you look at any industry,
there are intrinsic things you need to be able to do just to compete. But
what's important is thinking about what's unique about you, and I think a lot
of companies struggle with that. The way I grew up in terms of my strategy
background, what gives a company the ability to be unique is the capabilities
they have and how they apply them. In our case it might be craftsmanship — you
could say every guitar manufacturer has craftsmanship, but look at what we can
do at scale. We create guitars that may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,
and guitars that cost a few hundred dollars, with a lot of price points in
between. That requires not just craftsmanship but the ability to deal with
complexity. There's a capability behind that you can't just put in place — it
takes a long time to get there. We used to call it capabilities-driven
strategy, and I'm a big believer in it.

Then the other thing is: once
you know what's unique about you, if you invest a dollar, where do you invest
it? Do you invest in all the latest paths, or in the thing you know is unique
about you? My belief is you need to keep investing in the things that give you
the advantage, and that's how you further your uniqueness.

Curiosity matters too, and with
a company that has a long history, the risk is people think that because we've
been around so long, everything we do is the way it has to get done. A couple
of years ago we introduced something that sounds trivial but created quite a
shift — a consumer moment. At every management meeting, somebody brings a
consumer moment: a post somebody put on Instagram, or a visitor who shares a
story about themselves. In the beginning all the examples were positive —
Martin is great, Martin is the best. So we asked, are there no critical
examples? Then people started looking for a more balanced view. The point we
wanted to make as management is that bad examples are not bad. They're learning
moments. That's the curiosity — you observe something in your company and you
start asking questions, and those questions can move you forward big time.

Thomas:
I read all kinds of books — self-help, nonfiction, business books
for sure. But I also like fiction, and in fiction I love adventure stories.
Interestingly, I love stories with a journey aspect. When I reflect on a lot of
things in my life, even where I come from — a small village in the south of
Germany, and now I live here in the States — there's this moving, this journey
aspect. I love biographies, and series like Hornblower or Master and Commander.
We talked about Tolkien when we met, which is an annual reading ritual for me.
I still read it every time, and we watch the movies with the kids — by now we
know every phrase.

We know so much, but fiction
stories take you into a different horizon. I often use the phrase the art of
the possible, because to me the art of the possible is something where I always
see a frontier that I'm close to — and then I have to remind myself that the
art of the possible goes way beyond what I naturally would think about. That
opens up so much.

Recently I've forced myself to
pick up physical books again, because I believe you read differently with a
physical book in your hand, and I think it helps you focus more. Same with
music — I'm into vinyl again. I love the idea of picking a vinyl album that's
physical, and you're stuck with it, because you can't just listen quickly and
flip to the next one. There's something about being in the moment but also
removing all these options.

Thomas:
One area that ties to the future is sustainability. With our
instruments we've traditionally used organic materials, woods, sourced from all
over the world. Some of those tonewoods are becoming harder to source, more
expensive, rarer, more regulated. Martin has been on a path to look for
alternatives for decades — we were actually the first guitar manufacturer to
adopt a formal environmental policy and responsible sourcing. Ebony is a good
example: traditionally a lot of guitar manufacturers only used the black
portion of the ebony wood, but the tree actually has different colors. So now
we use more of the ebony, not just the black part. We've also used alternatives
to ebony for quite a while. I think Martin has been on the forefront there, and
we keep pushing the envelope, because we have to.

People who love Martin would
probably love to have more of a foot in the past when it comes to tradition.
But especially with the younger player base, how responsible you are with the
environment is becoming more and more important. So yes, you cater to tradition,
but you also look for opportunities to create alternatives and educate people
on what the reality is.

Karen:
Is there a moment you've had in this role where you thought, this is
just the coolest thing?

Thomas:
It happens every day when we imagine new products — I always think,
am I really sitting here participating in these discussions? But it's artists.
I love to connect with artists. Earlier this year we opened a showroom in LA,
in an area called Center Staging where bands prepare for their tours. I was
visiting one day and we heard Paul McCartney might stop by. There was a certain
window when it might happen, and it didn't. Then about an hour later I was
talking to another artist in the showroom and I see Paul McCartney and his
manager walk in. That's something that doesn't happen easily — to be able to
spend some time with somebody like Paul McCartney, that was just magical.

Karen: Thank you so much
for sharing your story and for the remarkable way that you're lifting you know
Martin into the next generation and it's next chapter, but the people and to
the next chapter and all of the great insights on how you live your life, which
I so appreciate. And you really remind us that leadership isn't only strategy,
it's soul. Um, creativity, reading, artistic expressions, they're they aren't
hobbies, they're engines of possibilities. And thank you so much for coming
today.

Thomas: Thanks, Karen.
That was fun. Thank you.

Karen: Thomas comes off
much more like an artist than your typical CEO. And I believe that's what makes
his leadership unique. He turned his passion into a reality, and I think the
Martin Guitar brand is in good hands while Thomas is plucking the strings.