A German guitar maker, a finger on a map, and Lake Erie.

Lakewood began in spring 1986, the company says, when Martin Seeliger, a guitar maker who had finished his training a few years earlier, set out on his own near Gießen in Hesse. Germany in the 1980s was still largely a country of the classical guitar, the company says, while the sound of the steel-string western guitar was arriving from across the Atlantic; Seeliger’s idea was to answer it with an acoustic guitar built in Germany.

The name came from a map. Looking for a strong name, the company says, Seeliger’s finger stopped on the small town of Lakewood on Lake Erie — German Wikipedia links it to Lakewood, Ohio, near Cleveland — and he liked that it “sounded of freedom and adventure, of wood, nature and wide open space.” That, in the company’s words, was the moment a German acoustic guitar got an American name.

German Wikipedia, in an article flagged as relying heavily on the company’s own account, adds that Seeliger opened a guitar shop in Gießen in 1983, shortly after qualifying as a journeyman plucked-instrument maker, passed his master’s examination in 1984, and built a number of classical guitars under his own name before Lakewood. When the shop outgrew its space he sold it and moved into larger workshops in the Gießen district of Rödgen, in a former cigar factory. Lakewood stayed there for about 34 years, the company says, before moving in February 2022 to a building on an industrial estate in Alten-Buseck, which it had bought three years earlier and converted, largely with its own hands, into a workshop with an attached timber store.

Dreadnoughts, solid woods and a configurator.

The first Lakewood guitars were dreadnoughts — the large body shape introduced by Martin in 1916 — according to German Wikipedia, which says the trim was generally plain and that a smaller “Grand Concert” body followed in 1991. Today the company offers three lines, Natural, Deluxe and Premium, across five body shapes, as purely acoustic models or with a cutaway and pickup. It says it uses only solid tonewoods, thin finishes and, on its electro-acoustic models, pickup systems from the American maker L.R. Baggs, most often the Anthem; it sums up the approach as “less is more.”

Much of Lakewood’s work is now custom. Its website offers a 3D guitar designer in which a buyer chooses body shape, woods, ergonomic details and trim and sees a photo-realistic preview with a price — a tool the company calls unique in the world of the acoustic guitar, which we give as its claim. It says it mixes hand and machine work, and adds that “Made in Germany alone is not a mark of quality.” For more than ten years, it says, buyers have been able to order a guitar made entirely of European woods, from fingerboard to tuner buttons, and the configurator has a native-woods mode to show those options. It also says it uses only certified timber, that its own solar panels supply about 30 per cent of its electricity, and that the rest comes from renewable sources.

German Wikipedia mentions side projects: a stage guitar in the mid-1990s, and the Alien acoustic basses, which it says were developed on commission for Warwick. In September 2025, after almost 40 years of purely acoustic building, Lakewood showed the first three prototypes of an electric guitar, the Tschabo, at the Guitar Summit in Mannheim; the show’s website reported that the name nods to the local dialect of Gießen.

Design and documentation.

Two names came west after the Second World War from Schönbach in Bohemia, now Luby in the Czech Republic. Höfner was founded there by Karl Höfner in 1887 and now works in Baiersdorf in Franconia, where GEWA music took over its business on 1 April 2026 after an insolvency, with the brands held by a Thomann and GEWA holding company. Hoyer, founded in Schönbach by Franz Hoyer in 1874, was re-established at Tennenlohe near Erlangen in 1945 and stopped making guitars in 1987, German Wikipedia says; its website now announces a relaunch in 2027.

Hanika is a Baiersdorf neighbour. Helmut Hanika started his own firm in 1953, making archtop guitars, and later moved to classical guitars, from 1965 by the company’s account and in the 1970s by German Wikipedia’s; the business now belongs to his son Armin, and the company says its instruments are made mostly by hand.

Three are workshops founded by their makers. Lakewood, started in 1986 by Martin Seeliger, builds steel-string guitars at Buseck near Gießen; it says they are built in Germany. Teuffel is Ulrich Teuffel’s company in Neu-Ulm, founded in 1988, he says, and he builds the guitars himself. Marleaux is Gerald Marleaux’s bass workshop at Clausthal-Zellerfeld in the Harz, working since 1990, whose Consat Custom bass won a German musical instrument prize in 2017.

GEWA music is the odd one out, an instrument and accessory company rather than a single workshop: founded at Adorf in the Vogtland by Georg Walther in 1925, it spent five decades in Mittenwald before returning to Adorf, and says it makes products at German, European and Asian sites.

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.

Still run by its founder, still built near Gießen.

Lakewood is still run by its founder. Martin Seeliger and Markus Hoppe, a partner in the firm for more than a decade, are co-managing directors, the company says, and Seeliger’s sons Theodor and Johannes work in the business, in materials and marketing. The company named on its website is Lakewood Guitars GmbH & Co. KG, and it states that “Lakewood” is a registered trademark. No outside owner appears in the sources we checked. In June 2023 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described Lakewood as the largest German maker of western guitars, and the company marks its 40th anniversary in 2026.

Where the guitars are made is stated plainly: the company says every Lakewood since 1986 has been built just outside Gießen, and its home page carries the line “In Deutschland gebaut. Weltweit geliebt” — built in Germany, loved worldwide. It opens the workshop to visitors once a month for guided tours. The players it lists include Dave Matthews, Thom Yorke, Ritchie Blackmore, Johannes Oerding, Michael Patrick Kelly and Wallis Bird, and it offers a signature model for the South Korean fingerstyle guitarist Sungha Jung; the FAZ reported in 2023 that Blackmore, the former Deep Purple guitarist, would soon play an instrument from Buseck.

For a design guide, Lakewood shows how a small workshop can borrow an American place name and make it stand for German craft, and how a configurator can become part of a brand. Compare Furch, a family acoustic-guitar maker in the Czech Republic, and Martin, whose dreadnought Lakewood first followed. For this guide we use lake blue, spruce and cedar brown with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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