About Us
Badlands Guitar Company was born in 2023 from a simple idea shared between two friends, Luka Skalabrin and TK, who are passionate about guitars and wanted to relive the golden era of the Sunset Strip. Hot, rowdy, rockstar guitars that capture everything great about the 80s, made available to everyone.
We build the guitars we want to own. We price them the way we'd want to pay for them. Not at the maximum the market will bear, but at the price we'd feel good about as players ourselves. That philosophy drives every decision we make.
Our mission has always been clear: do what no one else is doing, and do it better than everyone else. That's not just a tagline. If we aren't living up to that, we aren't Badlands.
It's our commitment to our customers, through and through.
What we didn't anticipate was how quickly you'd respond. Demand grew faster than our original build facility could handle, and so we leveled up. In 2026, Badlands became a co-owner of SunSmith Manufacturing, a 10,000 sq ft guitar and bass production facility in Glen Arm, Maryland.
We remain grateful for our roots and the partnerships that got us here, but all production is now handled at SunSmith, giving us a level of quality control, capacity, and capability we never had before.
When we launched, we had one model and one body shape. Today, Badlands offers multiple models across bolt-on and neck-through constructions, in both double-cut and V body shapes, with more on the horizon. That growth belongs to our customers as much as it belongs to us. You believed in what we were building, and that belief is what made all of this possible.
Every Badlands guitar is built in small, limited runs with the same obsessive attention to detail that started this whole thing. From the tip of the headstock to the lower strap button, nothing gets overlooked. Our pickups are hand-wound exclusively for Badlands by a dedicated builder who works for no one else.
We feel like we're still just getting started. Thank you for coming along on this journey with us
