Watch Gibson Destroy All “Unsafe” Guitars
via BJ's World/YouTube
Yikes!
A footage recently posted by a former Gibson employee, BJ Wilkes, on YouTube showed the manufacturer destroying hundreds of new guitars, the Firebird X. Explaining to YouTube channel The Guitologist, Wilkes revealed that Gibson’s decision to destroy the instruments were mostly done because of poor sales. He said, “Gibson literally could not sell these guitars and they were on the books.” Especially since the company has been facing numerous financial problems, the “investors were all trying to clean up the mess before the end of the fiscal year.”
The Firebird X was conceptualized under former CEO Henry Juszkiewicz. Wilkes added that the said incident happened after Juszkiewicz’s ousting in October 2018.
After the video was leaked, Gibson got flak because they could’ve just donated the guitars instead of destroying them. In an official statement released, they clarified that it was “an isolated batch of Firebird X models built in 2009-2011 which were unsalvageable and damaged with unsafe components. This isolated group of Firebird X models were unable to be donated for any purpose and were destroyed accordingly.”
It’s no surprise that the Firebird X just didn’t appeal to guitarists everywhere. The design and features were all over the place. Wilkes, who worked for six years at Gibson, described it as a “horrible guitar with too much technology all based on Windows 98 or something.”
What are your thoughts on this?
