The decal and the guitar

In July 1982 the Fujigen factory in Matsumoto, Japan, changed one thing on a guitar it had been building for a few months. The early export models carried a big Fender logo and a small "Squier Series." The new ones carried a big Squier logo where Fender had been. In the words of the guitar historian Tony Bacon, they were "the same guitars with this simple change."¹

The reason was price, not wood. Fender's British distributor wanted a cheaper line for Europe, and the answer was to sell some of the Japanese-made Fenders under a different name. Its sales and marketing director, Martin Fredman, recalled the logic: "There had to be some differential to make people realize these weren't the authentic American product, but that they were getting something made under the auspices of Fender. They just wouldn't pay so much money for it."¹ The first Squier Stratocaster was priced in Britain at £223, against £436 for the cheapest American Strat.¹

So the word "Squier" was born as a price signal on an unchanged object. Players argued with it from the start. A CBS/Fender district sales manager, Graeme Mathieson, later recalled that people came ready to dismiss a Japanese Fender, "But when they played them, everybody just said, 'These are better than the American guitars.'"¹ That is a memory, not a measurement. It shows the label and the object disagreeing on the first day, not only after forty years. Forty years later the word is still read, on any used guitar, as a verdict on the object.

A label is a compression

A guitar has many properties that matter: the factory, the year, the wood, the neck's shape and straightness, the frets, the electronics, what has been replaced, how it has been set up, how it has been treated. A brand tier compresses all of that into a few bits at most: this name or another one.

Compression is not a flaw. At the moment of sale, the bit is useful. It tells a buyer which price band and which specification the maker intended, and for a new guitar bought without playing it, that is real information.

But the bit was tuned for that moment. Over time it decays, in three ways.

The name drifts. A trademark owner can put a name on whatever it chooses, so a name can stay fixed while everything under it moves.

The object diverges. Necks move, frets wear, parts get swapped, owners refinish, repair and modify. Nobody updates the decal.

And individual variance was never in the label at all. Two guitars from the same line, the same week, can differ in the wood and the hand work. The decal says nothing about which one you are holding.

The older and more travelled the guitar, the less the label carries and the more the object does.

How far the name drifted

An enthusiast-run reference, SquierWiki, keeps a list of the serial numbering found on Squiers, compiled by owners from the instruments themselves. It has sections for Squiers made in Japan, the USA, Mexico, Korea, China and Taiwan, Indonesia and India.² In Korea alone it names five factories.² Fender's own dating guide confirms one of them, Cort, from 1997.³

One word, at least seven countries, many factories, four decades.² Whatever "Squier" told a buyer in Europe in 1982, it cannot tell a buyer the same thing about a guitar today without knowing which of those it is.

Where the knowledge went

The manufacturer is candid about its limits. Its guide to Japanese-made instruments says the early records "are not complete" and that serial numbers "should only be used as a guide for dating and should be used in combination with known age-related specifications."⁴ Its Korean guide says Fender began making Fender and Squier instruments in Korea in 1988, that its digital records go back only to mid-1993, and that serial dating before 1993 is "highly uncertain."³

The owners' wiki lists Korean Squiers made by the Young Chang factory in 1987.² That is a year before the maker's stated start. One of the two records is wrong, or they are counting differently. Nothing read for this piece settles which.

Leave the conflict standing, because it is the point. For those years, the people who own the guitars keep a more detailed record of what was made than the company that made them, if not necessarily a more accurate one. The official category thinned out, and the knowledge moved to the owners, recorded from the objects.

Finer labels, also lossy

When a label stops carrying information, people build finer ones.

The first Squiers had serial numbers beginning "JV," and collectors now call them "JV" models, for Japanese Vintage.¹⁴ The early logo layout, big Fender and small Squier, is in Bacon's words "a small change since afforded importance by collectors."¹ A change made to keep a price down became a feature that collectors seek out.

The finer labels compress too. On SquierWiki, a serial beginning with "E" means "Eighties" on a USA-made Squier, a 1984 to 1987 run on a Japanese one, and on a Korean one either Young Chang or Sung Eum, told apart by whether the digits are printed in silver or black.² Some India-made Squier IIs from around 1989 carried their serial on a sticker, and the wiki notes it is "fairly common" for that number to be missing.² Even the identifying mark can fall off the object.

This piece's own search for what JV Squiers sell for turned up serial-lookup websites quoting price ranges that do not agree with each other, alongside a story that their quality alarmed Fender's management. None of those pages gave a source, and no price is asserted here. They are worth noticing as a sign of what fills the space a thinned-out label leaves: folklore, and prices attached to it.

The strongest objection

The label is not useless, and the strongest objection is that this whole argument overrates the exceptions.

For someone buying a new guitar without playing it, the name and the price line probably predict the average guitar well. The famous early Squiers are a few years' production out of forty. And the stories of cheap guitars that outplay expensive ones are exactly the kind of story people repeat: the bad cheap guitars were thrown away, and the good ones were kept and talked about.

The history here also rests mostly on one historian's feature, built on participants' recollections decades later, in a magazine piece that also introduces Fender's new JV anniversary models.¹ The memories are specific and consistent. They are still memories, told in a setting that has a reason to tell them warmly.

All of that is fair, and it narrows the claim. The argument is not that Squiers are secretly better. It is that the label answers a question about a sale and gets asked a question about an object.

Not just guitars

The car industry has a name for the 1982 move. Rebadging, or "badge engineering," is described as "an intentionally ironic misnomer in that little or no actual engineering takes place": an existing product gets a new badge so it can be sold as a distinct model in a different segment.⁵ General Motors sold the Camaro as the Firebird for decades.⁵

The mechanism is the same. A badge is a decision about a market. It is evidence about the object only to the extent that the object stayed what the badge promised. The same structure should appear wherever durable goods are sold new under tiered names and then judged, used, by those names: cameras, watches, furniture, records.

What survives, and an open edge

What survives is an order of evidence for any one used object, with the label last. First the object itself, and within it, what is hard to change before what is easy. Strings, setup, pickups and tuners can be replaced for modest money; the neck's wood and stability, the frets' condition and the body are what the instrument is. A guitar that is good where change is hard can be made very good, and the decal cannot tell you which kind you are holding. Then its history, as far as it can be traced. Then the maker's documents, which, in Fender's case, send you back to the object anyway. Then the badge.

The open edge is about where knowledge lives. If makers' records thin out and owners' records thicken, then for old objects the authority shifts from the company to the community that handles the things. That community's records are richer and less reliable at the same time: observed on real instruments, unverified one by one, and open to folklore and to fakes of whatever finer label becomes valuable.

The only record that cannot drift away from the object is one kept for that single object: what it is, what was done to it, and when. Most guitars do not have one. The decal is the one record every guitar carries, and it was written for the day of sale.