A sales and marketing director who went back to the winding machine.

Curt Mangan is both a person and a string company. The company says its founder spent 17 years, from 1986 to 2003, as director of sales and marketing at Ernie Ball, the California string maker behind Slinky strings, before leaving to start his own brand. The Cortez Journal confirmed the Ernie Ball role in a profile in March 2018, describing him as its director of sales and marketing “in California.”

Before the corporate job he was a working musician. The company says he started playing at 10, had a recording contract at 17 and started his own label, Mangatune Records, at 22; it says his 1980 power-pop album Promise was reissued in 2015 and that he released a solo album, Here I Am, in 2018. The Cortez Journal adds that he took his first lessons at the Natural Music Guild in Loveland, Colorado, formed a trio called Forrest at 17, and over the years worked in and owned music stores, built and repaired guitars and taught. A 2008 version of the company website lists the same mix of jobs.

The business itself began in 2004. Archived copies of curtmangan.com show a holding page reading “We’re Almost There!! (Really)” under a 2004 Curt Mangan Inc. copyright in April that year, and by June a working shop with a mailing address in Paso Robles, California, on Pacific time. That detail matters because the brand is now known for Colorado: the company did not start there.

A small factory in the Four Corners.

The move came quickly. The Cortez Journal reported that Mangan opened the family business in California in 2004 and moved it to Cortez, Colorado, two years later; archived copies of the website already show a Cortez address and Colorado phone numbers in February 2006, after a California address in January 2005. Mangan told the paper there was “a little bit of an attraction to the Four Corners area,” and that the family chose Cortez “because of the beauty of the area.” The town sits in Colorado’s south-west corner, near Mesa Verde.

Today the company calls Cortez home and says its strings are “proudly made in Cortez, Colorado using only USA-made wire.” Its factory-tour page says it makes more than 700 individual strings there; Jazz Guitar Today repeated that figure in 2022. In 2018 the Cortez Journal counted 400 single strings and 250 packaged sets, four employees and seven winding machines, which Mangan oversees, testing every batch of wire for strength. “Our machines are specially made,” he told the paper. “What sets us apart is that our recipe came from scratch, from trial and error, and me being a guitar player for many years.”

That “recipe” is the idea behind FusionMatched, the name printed with the brand. The company says FusionMatched was originally going to be the company name, standing for the choice of wire maker, custom-built machines and core-to-wrap ratios behind each gauge; at launch it was unsure the trademark would be granted, so it used the founder’s name instead, and it says the FusionMatched mark was registered in 2005. A 2006 version of the website called it “our trademarked proprietary method” combining “100% made in the USA wire and 100% USA workmanship.”

The range is wide for a small maker. Alongside electric, acoustic and bass sets it sells round-core strings, which it presents as a vintage construction, pure nickel and Monel sets, half-size gauges, pedal-steel, mandolin, banjo, ukulele and classical strings, and sets for the bajo sexto and a 12-string requinto aimed at corridos and sierreño music. Its website runs an “Ask Curt” question page, a string selector and tension charts.

Design and documentation.

Six of the seven guitar-string makers in this guide are American, ranging from a division of a large materials company to small workshops. Elixir strings are sold by W. L. Gore & Associates, the privately held fluoropolymer company of Newark, Delaware, best known for Gore-Tex; Elixir’s contact page gives an address in Elkton, Maryland.

GHS takes its name from its founders, Gould, Holcomb and Solko, who began making strings in 1964; the company says Robert McFee bought it in 1975 and that it remains family-owned, based in Battle Creek, Michigan. DR Strings was founded in 1989 by Mark Dronge, son of the Guild founder Alfred Dronge, and Benzion Rapoport, English Wikipedia says; it is based in Westwood, New Jersey, and says its strings are made in the USA.

Dean Markley began in 1972, when Dean Markley, a Santa Clara, California, music-store owner, started selling his own strings; English Wikipedia now places the company in Glendale, Arizona. Curt Mangan, founded in 2004 by a former Ernie Ball sales and marketing director, says it makes its strings in Cortez, Colorado. Stringjoy says its strings are made in its own facility in Nashville, Tennessee.

The European maker is Savarez, of Caluire-et-Cuire on the edge of Lyon, which dates itself to 1770 and says its strings are handmade in France; it does not publish who owns it.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family business with a founder’s name on the pack.

Curt Mangan presents itself as a family business, and the local press agrees. The Cortez Journal reported in 2018 that Mangan owned the company, that family members handled packing, shipping and marketing, and that his stepdaughter Samantha Cameron had designed the company website and the graphics on its string packaging. She told the paper the “fusion matched” idea meant “a fusion between family, industry and players”; the company’s own page now describes it as a fusion of “player, industry and handmade production.” We found no record of the company being sold or taking outside investment, though that is an absence in the sources we checked rather than a confirmed fact.

Its message has shifted over time. In 2006 the website said: “We do not coat our strings.” Today it sells FusionMatched coated phosphor bronze and nickel sets alongside its uncoated lines, so the brand’s claims are best read with a date attached. The same goes for its artist lists: the website names players including Bryan Adams, Dolly Parton and Lady Antebellum, while the Cortez Journal reported that band members of Miranda Lambert, Lady Antebellum, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Charlie Daniels Band used the strings, among about 800 artists. The paper also reported that the company sells only to independent, bricks-and-mortar music shops besides its own website.

For a design guide, Curt Mangan shows how a small maker can build a brand on a founder’s name, a trademarked process word and a place of manufacture. Compare Ernie Ball, where Mangan spent 17 years, and D’Addario, the largest of the American string makers. For this guide we use a mesa red with bronze, nickel and ink with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Curt Mangan’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.