A Taiwanese instrument group, a stand factory in Tianjin, and a hero’s name.

Hercules Stands is not a stand-alone company with a founder of its own. It is a house brand of KHS Musical Instruments, the Taiwanese instrument group, and it was launched in 2002. Chinese-language Wikipedia traces KHS to 1930, when the Hsieh brothers set up a business called Wan Wu in Qishan, then part of Kaohsiung county; it took the name Kung Hsue She (功學社) in 1945, which English Wikipedia glosses as a company helping schools and culture, and the initials became its trademark. KHS opened a factory at Luzhou, near Taipei, in 1956 to make harmonicas, added band instruments the following year, and in 1980 started the Jupiter brand of wind instruments. Its own brands now include Jupiter, Mapex drums, Majestic percussion, Altus flutes and XO brass alongside Hercules.

The stands came out of a factory before they had a name. The KHS group says its JMS factory in Tianjin, China, was set up in 1994 to make instrument stands, microphone stands, light stands and hangers, and that by 1996 it was building music products for “many famous brands.” In 2002, the group says, “Hercules was born”: the brand made its debut at the NAMM Show and at Messe Frankfurt, the Tianjin plant gained ISO 9002 certification, and the first range was built around a patented mechanism called the Auto Grip System. KHS says it controls manufacturing in its own factories, and its Hercules history names Tianjin as the plant.

The name is explained plainly on the group’s brand page: Hercules, the hero of the Twelve Labors, “best known as the strongest of all mortals.” The brand’s regional websites, for international buyers, the United States, Canada, Germany, Europe and Japan, share one slogan, “Stands You Can Trust,” and four words: safe, secure, stable, strong. In the United States the stands are distributed by KHS America, which runs a limited lifetime warranty on stands bought from authorized American dealers.

One self-locking yoke, then 150 models.

The Auto Grip System, or AGS, is the idea the brand still rests on. The yoke at the top of an AGS guitar stand closes around the neck of the instrument when the guitar is set down, so a bump does not tip it out; Hercules calls it a self-locking mechanism and says it “quickly became the preference of guitarists everywhere.” KHS says the AGS stands and hangers had sold in the millions by 2006.

The range widened quickly. KHS dates the Quik-N-EZ music and microphone stands to 2003 and calls them the world’s first such stands whose height could be set with one hand. In 2005 came a two-in-one microphone stand, the AutoLock keyboard stand, the EZ-Safe instrument stand and a keyboard bench, and, the group says, the millionth instrument stand off the line. The slim, portable TravLite stands and the EZ-Glide music and microphone stands followed in 2007, then the EZ-Clutch and EZ-Lok mechanisms. By the end of its first decade, Hercules says, it had launched more than 150 models of stands and accessories, and KHS claims more than 30 patents.

The awards KHS lists are trade awards, and we give them in its words. It says American retailers voted Hercules a “Must Buy” in The Music Trades in June 2004; that the Home Series won the Music & Sound Award for “Best Guitar Accessory of 2008”; that the iStand series won a Best in Show award at NAMM in 2009; that TravLite was named among the “Best Tools for Schools” in 2011; that the DS802B percussion table stand won a Music & Sound Award in 2013; and that in 2014 Hercules won Best in Show and “Best Accessories and Add-ons” at NAMM, while the GS414B guitar stand received a Guitarist Choice award from the British magazine Guitarist.

Later lines follow the same pattern of a named mechanism. The AGS Plus series of 2019 fitted a wider range of necks and added an instant height-adjustment clutch, and KHS calls its AGS ukulele stand of the same year a world first. The DG Adaptive Series of 2021 moved into podcast arms and phone and tablet holders, and recent releases include a folding desktop music stand and a low-brass stand. In 2017, KHS says, the guitarist Steve Vai became the brand’s official spokesperson.

Design and documentation.

Instrument stands are a quiet trade, and most of the names in it are owned by larger groups. Three of the brands in this set make broad ranges of stands for every instrument. Hercules belongs to KHS Musical Instruments of Taiwan, which says it has existed since 1930 and makes its products in company-owned factories. On-Stage is a division of The Music People of Berlin, Connecticut, which says it was founded in 1979 and is now “an Exertis | JAM business.” König & Meyer says it was founded in 1949 at Wertheim am Main, in Germany, by Karl König and Erich Meyer, and that almost all the metal and plastic parts of its products are made in-house.

Two grew up around keyboards and the stage. Ultimate Support says its founder, Darrell Schoening, built his first A-frame speaker stands in 1977 from salvaged hang-glider tubing; the brand now belongs to ACT Entertainment. Quiklok says it was founded in 1983 between Castelfidardo and Recanati, in Italy’s Marche, and that its first products were the QL/606 and QL/642 keyboard stands.

One is a drum-hardware specialist. Gibraltar was among the percussion brands that Fender’s KMC Music sold to Drum Workshop in January 2015, Music Inc. reported, and it came under Roland when the Japanese company bought DW in 2022, MusicRadar reported.

The last is a wall-hanger maker. String Swing says it was founded in 1987 by Paul Thieman and Anne Tainter, who ran a small dairy farm in Elroy, Wisconsin, and that its entire product line is still made in that state.

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.

Yellow accents on black steel.

Hercules has a colour it names itself. In a 2022 release marking twenty years of the brand, the company wrote that “the yellow accents common to Hercules products” could be spotted in concert venues large and small, on stands behind thousands of musicians. The same release closed on two words in capitals, trust and reliability, which it called the cornerstones of the brand. KHS says it updated the brand’s website and “visual brand language” in 2016, but it does not publish the typeface or the colour values, so the palette here is our reading.

The rest of the identity is in the naming. Every mechanism gets a trade name, Auto Grip System, EZ-Glide, EZ-Clutch, TravLite, TightVice, and every product an alphanumeric code such as GS414B or DS753BB, the way a hardware maker would list parts. For the twentieth anniversary Hercules issued limited Plexi versions of its best-selling AGS guitar stands and hangers, the GS414BLT, GSP38WBLT and GSP39WBLT, which it described as re-imagined versions of its classic designs in an advanced material.

The brand also argues for durability. Its sustainability page says Hercules began looking for alternative packaging in 2021 and lists the plastic it says it has removed each year since: handles, hang tags and foam from guitar, music and microphone stand packaging, polyethylene boxes from TravLite stands and guitar hangers, and nylon straps from smaller cartons. Its stated reason is that cheap, disposable stands carry hidden costs in waste.

For a design guide, Hercules Stands shows how a stand can be branded through one mechanism, one colour and a set of trade names rather than through a logo. Compare On-Stage, an American stand brand sold by a distributor, and Fender, whose guitars sit on stands like these. For this guide we use black, steel grey and a strong yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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