Company hopes its Beatles guitar straps and picks hit the right notes with consumers

Planet Waves' line of Beatle authorized guitar straps. (Photos courtesy D'Addario & Company, Inc.)

A new line of authorized Beatles products geared for musicians are just hitting the market.

 Planet Waves, a division of the D'Addario Co., is marketing Beatles guitar straps and Beatles guitar picks. Though Beatle picks have been on the market before, the company says their guitar straps are the first such authorized products.

Company president and CEO Jim D'Addario says getting them to market took time.

"We made an agreement with the licensing company, I believe, about a year ago," he said in a phone interview. "It took a lot of negotiating and then they gave us all this digital art, which was kind of fun because I’m a huge Beatle fan.  … I grew up playing the guitar with Beatles music. I have a lot of their memorabilia and stuff in my office. It was kind of a fun project for me to be involved in. So we got all this art, which was all the album covers and associated illustrations and various other photographs and literally gigabytes and gigabytes of graphics.

"So once we got all those, (it was), ‘Wow, what do we use?,’ you know. And we had the limitations of the process. Printing on picks and straps is not easy."

But there was another thing that had to be dealt with, D'Addario said. Paul McCartney wouldn't allow the straps to be made out of animal hides.

"(With) the straps, we also had the limitation from Paul McCartney being vegan that we weren’t allowed to use any hides. We had to create these out of synthetic materials and then put a sealer on them so they don’t affect the finish on guitars. And it was a lot of development from the product point of view and the printing process point of view. ... It’s running quite nicely now, but it took quite a while to get there and to get the art design. "

He says the synthetic straps require a little extra care. 

"You have a compatibility issue between some of these plastic materials and some of the finishes on vintage instruments and the instruments that are still made with natural lacquer finishes. And you’ve got to be careful when you put your guitar away you don’t store the strap behind the guitar with a lot of pressure on it. It could change the finish. We put a sealer on them that insulates the strap from the guitar finish. ... So we have a little warning sticker on the back that tells people be careful with it. Lots of these straps are sold on the market successfully. It’s a question of making sure you know how to take care of it."

D'Addario and Company's line of Beatles guitar picks includes designs
inspired by the "Revolver," "Meet the Beatles" and "Yellow Submarine"
albums.

"We decided to kind of go with focusing on albums, first, and picking an album from each era," Addario says. "We got the ‘Meet the Beatles’, we had ‘Hard Day’s Night,’ the heads from the cover. We’ve got a ‘Yellow Submarine,' the collage  ... It took a while to kind of get the graphics we liked to work on the computer, but also get it to look good on the strap."

Once the graphic designs were chosen, they they had to be approved by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Olivia Harrison and Yoko Ono.

"And that took several go-rounds before everything was approved by the Beatles. They literally have a process where they pass the samples to Paul, Ringo, George’s wife and Yoko. And everybody has to approve it," he said.

"The picks are standard celluloid picks, which are the most popular picks on the market," he continued. "And we have three assortments and there are five different pick designs in each assortment. You get two of each, so it’s a pack of 10. And they come on a blister card in like a five petal flower arrangement with two picks in each cavity. They’re available (in) thin, medium and heavy. And in three different designs. There’s one that got album cover images on there – ‘Yellow Submarine’, ‘Abbey Road’ and that kind of thing. And there’s the ‘Meet the Beatles’ picks, which is a black pick with silhouetted faces printed on one side and the Beatles logo on the other. And then the other ones are white picks with the ‘Revolver’ art. Each one of their heads extracted out of the ‘Revolver’ cover artwork."

He said the picks were evaluated intensely by the two Beatles and John Lennon and George Harrison's widows.

"All the picks took quite a while because they were real fussy about the clarity of the small print and so on. And anyway, so they’re out now and doing real well," he says.

The company is already looking ahead to new designs.

 "We’re going to be working on a few more additions to the line before the Christmas season. ... Depending on how the sales are for each model, some (of the current ones) might stay on for a long time, and some might get replaced with new ones more quickly," he says.

"So, it’s going to depend on the sales results. I have a feeling the black ‘Meet the Beatles’ strap is going to be in the line forever ... there are certain straps that people seem to gravitate to right away.

"But … it remains to be seen."

• Planet Waves guitar picks and strings are available through Amazon.com.