A one-man start in the Central Valley.

Gravity Picks is one of the youngest names among guitar-accessory makers. The company says Gravity Picks Inc “started in early 2011 from a dream to operate a sustainable business in the music industry,” and that “a $4,000 investment, which was my entire life savings” paid for the bare essentials needed to make its first picks. The founder tells the story in the first person on the company’s “About Us” page, which opens: “Hello Internet. My name is Chris.” He says he began playing guitar at 12, in a church, and credits his teachers, his father and a mentor he calls Mr. Mahoney. The page gives no surname, and we found none in the company’s own pages, so we do not give one.

The earliest version of its website that the Internet Archive holds, captured in June 2011, called the business Gravity Guitar Picks and carried the line “Handmade in California.” It offered picks in three thicknesses — 0.75, 1.5 and 3 millimetres — and described them as “handmade jewels” that were “crafted one at a time.” The tone was informal from the start: the checkout listed the cards it accepted and “large stacks of gold coins.”

The company places its workshop “about 60 miles east of San Francisco.” Its returns address today is in Ripon, a small city in San Joaquin County, in California’s Central Valley; in 2019 its newsletter sign-up gave addresses in Manteca, a larger city in the same county. Both fit the company’s own description of where it works.

Acrylic, bevels and a colour code.

Gravity’s core product is the acrylic pick, sold singly and in packs. Its store lists four sizes — Mini, Big Mini, Standard and XL — and several shapes, including the Classic, Sunrise, Razer, Stealth and Striker, with a choice of no holes, a single hole, several holes or an elliptical grip. The company says grip holes start at 2 millimetres, because thinner picks “can break easily.”

Thickness is shown by colour. In its single-pick range, 1.5 mm is fluorescent green, 2 mm blue, 3 mm orange, 4 mm yellow and 6 mm red, so the colour of a pick tells a player its gauge at a glance. That system is the nearest thing the brand has to a visual code, and it is the basis of the palette in this guide.

The bevels are the selling point. Gravity says the edges of each pick are shaped on a grinding wheel and then either polished or left rough — a finish it calls “Master Finish” — and that most of its picks have a bevel of about 80 degrees; a model called the Edge has a sharper 60-degree bevel, which it says “does wear out faster.” The polished version, it says, glides across the strings, while the unpolished one is a little brighter and lets a player “dig in.” A later Speed Bevels option for the Striker shape gives a “worn in” feel, in right- and left-handed versions.

Beside the acrylic range sit the Gold Series, which the company describes as a high-grade thermoplastic that is “amazingly wear-resistant”; a Colored Gold Series, moulded in nine colours; Thin Picks from 0.60 to 1.10 millimetres; and the 003, a small jazz-size pick that, the company says, is “the same size and shape as the one it looks like.” Its Acrylic Custom Shop claims more than 50,000 combinations of size, colour, thickness and finish, and it also makes picks carrying customers’ own logos and artwork.

Straps, capos, tuners and picks.

The seven makers in this guide each hold one corner of the guitar-accessory trade — straps, capos, tuners or picks — and most are still tied to a founder or a founding family.

Levy’s, which makes straps, was founded in 1973 by Dennis Levy, its 2009 website said, describing factories in Winnipeg and in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. In January 2019 Gator Co., the Tampa case maker, said it had acquired Levy’s the year before, and Levy’s now gives a Tampa address.

Three make capos. Shubb was formed in California in 1974 by Rick Shubb and Dave Coontz; Rick Shubb’s own history says a dedicated shop in Qingdao, China, was making about 80% of its capos by 2016, the year its founding partnership ended. Kyser says the machinist Milton Kyser had incorporated it in Texas by 1980, and that it makes its capos in Kaufman, Texas, under his great-niece Meredith McClung-Attebery. Paige, begun by Bryan Paige and his father Ralph in Michigan, says it now operates only from Erwin, Tennessee.

Two make tuners. Peterson Electro-Musical Products, founded by the inventor Richard H. Peterson, has been based in Alsip, outside Chicago, since 1964, its history says. Snark says it launched in 2010; in 2013 its warranty address was Evets Corporation’s, in Camarillo, California; English Wikipedia names Evets as the owner of Danelectro. Gravity Picks, the youngest, says it began in early 2011 and makes its acrylic picks in California.

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.

Made in the USA, by its own account.

Two collaborations give the brand its widest reach. The first is with JHS Pedals, the effects maker that says its pedals are made in Kansas City: Gravity sells an official JHS logo pick, a Classic Standard in 1.5 millimetres, and says one of them “comes with each JHS pedal,” and the JHS online store lists a five-pack of “JHS Pedals Gravity Picks.” The second is a signature pick for Rob Chapman, the British guitarist and YouTube presenter — a Razer Standard in 2 millimetres, unpolished, in smoke grey. English Wikipedia lists Gravity Picks among the brands Chapman has endorsed, citing his own biography.

Its manufacturing claim is direct: “Our manufacturing facility is near San Francisco in California. All picks are 100% made in the USA,” the company says, adding that its picks are hand-shaped and polished by professionals. We give that as its own statement; we found no independent account of the workshop. In 2019 its website footer also described it as a “proud member of NAMM,” the music-products trade association. We found no record of a sale or outside investor; the business still trades as Gravity Picks Inc., and no staff or revenue figures are published.

The brand’s voice is personal rather than corporate. Its “About Us” page ends with a quotation attributed to Henry Ford — “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t; you’re right” — and the founder’s photograph is captioned as his “guitar face.” We found no published brand guidelines.

For a design guide, Gravity Picks shows how a small direct-selling maker can turn a practical system — colour for thickness — into an identity. Compare Dunlop, the larger maker of Tortex picks, and D’Addario, the string maker with a wide accessories range. For this guide we use a deep blue, a bright blue, a fluorescent green and an orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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