The RKS team incubated RKS Guitars in the year 2000 as an internal project, which quickly turned into a guitar company that was building and selling guitars out of the factory RKS engineered as its own production and custom guitar demands in California. The design team, is all lovers of all types of music, with many guitar players themselves. This love for music and a friendship with Rock-N-Roll Hall-of-Famer Dave Mason sparked the idea of reinventing the electric guitar for the first time in decades. Through this collaboration, the team benchmarked the competitive landscape of guitars utilizing our Psycho-Aesthetics methodology to identify the critical interactions and touch-points of the guitar to identify areas that could be improved and leverage Dave’s expertise to understand what had to be the same. The results created a new guitar system platform with intellectual property around a perfected “Neck Through” core, neck, and headstock, that attached to a conductive Aluminum ribbing system to enable a platform to interchange the outer shells while providing the tonal quality and range they have become known for. Additionally, the new RKS guitar was the first “sustainable” and removed the need for exotic tonewoods that are responsible for much of the deforestation, by collaborating initially with Eastman Plastics and later Weyerhauser to utilize their Tenite, a material made from the wood pulp of farmed cottonwood trees and scrap wood bi-product. RKS and Mason prototyped and tested in studios and in concerts for years until they created electric guitar tones and plays that musicians would fall in love with. The RKS Guitar was featured on the cover of BusinessWeek as “the Best Design of the Year,” is played by Guitar Heroes, and has empowered guitar players in a new, fresh, sustainable, and great-sounding way, doing something that’s never been done before!