The Family That Has Been Making Strings Since Before the Guitar

Most guitar companies want to sell you the guitar - the object you keep, photograph, and hand down. D'Addario & Company built a very different business on the parts you throw away. Strings wear out. Reeds split. Drumheads dent. Sticks break. Every one of those is a purchase a player will make again, and D'Addario makes more of them, in more categories, than anyone else in the world.

The company is headquartered in Farmingdale, New York, employs roughly 1,100 people, and is estimated to bring in around $400 million a year. But the number that best explains it is much older. The family's trade as string makers - cordari, in the dialect of their home town - goes back to roughly 1680 in Salle, a village in the Abruzzo region of Italy, when an ancestor twisted animal gut into strings for lutes, violins and early guitars. That is not marketing shorthand. It is a real, documented craft lineage that predates the modern six-string guitar.

A catalog built around the six things you replace most

Under the D'Addario name and a set of acquired brands, the company covers nearly every consumable a working musician touches. Fretted strings for guitar, bass, mandolin, banjo and ukulele. Bowed strings for the orchestra. Drumheads, drumsticks, woodwind reeds, and the small hardware - tuners, capos, straps, cables, humidifiers, picks - that fills the rest of a gig bag.

The practical effect is easy to miss from the audience. At a lot of concerts, one family in Farmingdale made the strings, the reed, the drumheads and the sticks - four separate products, four separate brand names, one owner. The consolidation is deliberate. Where instrument makers rise and fall on a single flagship, D'Addario spread its risk across every category that gets consumed and re-bought.

From a first restring to the artist roster

The customer base runs the full range: a beginner buying a $6 set at a local shop, a touring professional under an endorsement deal, a school band director ordering reeds by the box, and an orchestra restringing for a season. That roster of endorsing artists spans genres and instruments - guitarists, drummers, and woodwind and orchestral players - and it doubles as the company's most credible advertising. When a player picks D'Addario on stage, the choice is visible in a way a guitar's internal wiring never is.

Consistency, and the strings that stop breaking

A string is a deceptively demanding product. It has to be dimensionally exact, tonally consistent from set to set, and durable against sweat and corrosion - all while being cheap enough to replace often. D'Addario's answer has been to control the whole chain. The company draws its own high-carbon steel wire rather than buying it in, which is unusual for a strings maker and gives it a tight grip on quality before the winding even begins.

That control produced its best-known technical story. In 2014 the company launched NYXL, electric strings built on a proprietary alloy it calls NY Steel, engineered so strings resist breaking and hold tune better after the bends and stretches of a set. Around the same idea it built coated lines - XT and XS - that slow corrosion and extend string life. None of this is glamorous. It targets the two complaints every guitarist has: strings snap, and strings go dull.

Three doors into the same factory

D'Addario sells through three channels at once. The oldest is B2B wholesale - strings and accessories shipped to music retailers and dealers around the world. The quietest is OEM: the company manufactures strings that reach players under other brands' names, which is part of why it is often called the workhorse of the string industry. The newest is direct-to-consumer, through daddario.com and the Players Circle loyalty program, which turns a one-off pack of strings into a repeat relationship.

Vertical integration ties it together. Because roughly 95% of products are made in the United States and the company mills its own wire, D'Addario absorbs more of the value chain than a pure assembler - and is harder to squeeze on price or supply. It is a mid-cap manufacturer competing in a category where the alternative is often cheaper offshore production.

Turning a throwaway product into a loop

Because strings are a consumable, they are also a waste problem - one municipal recycling won't take. In 2016 D'Addario launched Playback, run with TerraCycle, described as the first instrument-string recycling program. It accepts used strings of any brand, melts the metal down for reuse, and - through Players Circle - rewards participants with points they can spend on gear or donate. The company has pointed to an estimated 1.5 million-plus pounds of string metal a year that would otherwise reach landfill.

The sustainability push extends past strings. ProMark runs a tree-planting program tied to its wood use, and during the COVID-19 shutdown the company repurposed the mylar it uses for Evans drumheads into protective face shields. These are not side projects bolted onto a marketing plan so much as extensions of owning the materials in the first place.

Standing in a crowded field

In strings, the direct rivals are familiar: Ernie Ball, whose Slinky sets are a default for many electric players; Elixir, made by W.L. Gore, the pioneer of coated strings; and long-running makers like GHS, DR and Rotosound. In the other categories D'Addario meets specialists - Remo and Aquarian in drumheads, Vic Firth in sticks, Vandoren in reeds. What sets D'Addario apart is less any single product than breadth plus vertical integration: few competitors span this many instrument families while also making their own raw wire and manufacturing largely at home.

A third generation, and a job invented for a founder

The modern company was founded in 1973 by Jim and Janet D'Addario. In 2020 the top job passed to John D'Addario III, who came up through the business over more than two decades, while Jim moved into a role he essentially wrote for himself - Chairman and Chief Innovation Officer. Marketing and the digital shift sit with Chief Marketing Officer Jonathan Turitz, who has led the push to reposition D'Addario as a brand players choose deliberately rather than grab by habit.

The foundation the strings pay for

Alongside the company sits the D'Addario Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on bringing quality music education to underserved children. It is funded largely by the company - a percentage of sales plus a share of profits - which lets it promise that 100% of outside donations reach programs directly. Over a decade the foundation says it has reached roughly 2.5 million students across 700-plus programs. For a company that sells the tools of music, funding the next generation of people who will need them is a tidy loop.

Three centuries in one column

If you play, this is the aisle

For a player, the useful takeaway is practical. If a string keeps snapping mid-solo, the NYXL and NY Steel lines are built for exactly that. If strings go dull fast in humid conditions, the coated XT and XS sets are the answer. If you want your dead strings out of the landfill, Playback will take them - any brand - and pay you points for the trouble. And if you teach or run a school program, the foundation is a real door, not a logo.

Seen from the market, D'Addario occupies an unusual spot: not the flashiest name in any single category, but the broadest and most vertically integrated maker of the things musicians use up. It is a family business that treated an unglamorous consumable as the main event - and has been doing a version of it since before the guitar looked like a guitar.