EST. 2014
We wanted a guitar that could live the way musicians actually live.
Laika started in 2014 with a simple frustration: every guitar small enough to travel felt like a toy, and every guitar worth playing was too big to take along. Tours, flights, rehearsals, hotel rooms: the instrument you love stays home, and a compromise rides in the overhead bin.
So we built the guitar we couldn't buy. A full 25-inch scale with familiar fret spacing, on a body that fits carry-on limits. Not a practice gadget: a working instrument that happens to be small.
A decade on, that is still the whole idea. Named after Laika, the first dog in space: small, serious, and built to go where nothing had gone before.
Quality is chosen before it is built.
Every Laika begins in the timber stack, not on the bench. We pick through boards one by one for grain, weight and ring, then dry the keepers to 8% moisture. Only then does a body get carved, always from a single piece. What the wood gives, an oil finish keeps: thin enough to let the guitar breathe, tough enough for the road.
- CNC-machined, finished by hand
- Bodies, necks and even the fret slots are cut on CNC for consistent fit and intonation. Oil finishes and fretwork are done by hand, guitar by guitar.
- One board per body
- We sort through cubic metres of timber for the right blanks and dry them to 8% moisture before the first cut.
- Brass hardware from our own shop
- No bought-in parts. Bridges, saddles and tuners are designed by Laika and machined on five-axis CNC, then aged by hand.
- Pickups wound for the guitar
- Every set is professionally hand-wound to the wood, shape and weight of the instrument.
- Full scale, balanced
- A real 25-inch scale on guitars, 30 on basses. No neck dive, normal palm muting. The body is small; the neck is not.
- A person, not a brand
- You discuss your build with the people making it, get photos from the bench, and keep a direct line after delivery.
Nobody else builds it like this.
Most travel guitars are assembled from catalogue parts. A Laika has none: the bridges, saddles and tuners are our own designs, machined from brass in our own shop, and the pickups are hand-wound for the specific guitar they will live in. That is also why we can build things that don't otherwise exist, like a seven-string multiscale baritone you can carry onto a plane.
- In-house brass hardware, aged by hand, on every instrument
- Pickups wound to the individual guitar, not a parts bin
- Series guitars ready to order; the custom shop for everything else
- Built in 3 to 5 weeks, shipped worldwide, 2-year warranty
Wherever you play, it comes along.
