The story
In the late 1960s, St. Louis Music's founder, Gene Kornblum, met Master Luthier Kazuo Yairi, who produced handmade concert classical guitars at a factory in Japan. Together, St. Louis Music and the Yairi factory started to design and develop steel-string acoustic guitars, building them in Japan and importing them into the United States. The guitars took the brand name of St. Louis Music's Spanish guitar line, “Alvarez.” Similar instruments were also sold under the factory brand of “K. Yairi” in Europe and other parts of the world.
From 2005 to 2009, the brand was owned by LOUD Technologies, which also owned Mackie, Ampeg, Crate and other music-related brands. In 2009, Mark Ragin (owner of US Band & Orchestra and St. Louis Music) brought the management and distribution of the guitars back to St. Louis Music. As early as 2011, SLM senior vice president Chris Meikle has acted as Alvarez's head of development, overseeing the redesign of Artist Series and other models and rolling out new instrument lines such as the 2014 Masterworks Series, the Alvarez 50th anniversary 1965 Series, Alvarez-Yairi Honduran Series and the Grateful Dead Series.
While many of its models are produced in China, the acclaimed Alvarez-Yairi instruments are still handmade at the Yairi factory in Kani, Gifu-Japan, part of the legacy of the late Kazuo Yairi (1932–2014). Every Alvarez guitar then undergoes a full setup and inspection in their guitar shop in St. Louis, Missouri.
From Wikipedia’s article on Alvarez Guitars, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4