Official Luthiers Forum!

I had a rather weird experience today. I was reading a post on youtube where a musician was playing one of my guitars. The comment referred to some other poster, who was not seen, that claimed that Mahar guitars are Cr*p. I thought that that opinion was rather odd since there are only a half dozen or so of my instruments out there and it is very unlikely that a poster would have seen one much less developed a bad opinion of them. So I decided to investigate.

It turns out that there is a Chinese company that is making guitars under the Mahar name. I never trademarked my name so there is nothing that I can do about that. The real bummer is that these Mahar guitars are the ultra cheap guitars that are given away as prizes at amusement parks like Six Flags or Cedar Point. It looks like they were made and imported in 2009 and there don't seem to be any new ones.

I am usually more amused by this sort of thing but for some reason this really bothers me. I'm not looking forward to having to tell every one who looks at my instruments that it's not "That Mahar". Sigh I'm not going to try to do anything about it since it's far too late for that. My recent instruments are being marked with the name Maharguitar so there is at least some disambiguation.

Don't sell Mahar guitars ---- Sell "Michael Mahar" guitars (I'm assuming that is your full name). This will emphasize that you are a solo company. At least, that is what I would do.

Frustrating indeed! It might help your cause if you bagged the domain maharguitars.com and/or maharguitar.com - right now, no one seems to have registered those domains. Act fast, but once you check to see if the domain is still free and find that it is, book it right there and then, cuz if you don't, someone else will (domain registries sell lists of domain names that people look up and find are vacant!). If you can prove (with an invoice typically) that you shipped a "Mahar" guitar over a state line in return for money prior to the other Mahar operation, then you can still get the trademark.

Cheers,
Dave F.

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Cambrian Guitars

"There goes Mister Tic-Tac out the back with some bric-brac from the knick-knack rack"