Adam Jacobson and Ryan Sauter met back in college in Eau Claire, WI. Both were students in the Geology Department and a chance encounter in the halls of UWEC ultimately led to the origins of Acoustic Remedy. Both Adam's and Ryan's passion for playing music led to many songwriting and jam sessions in college and often times they could be found strumming away on front porches across the sleepy Wisconsin town.
Fast forward about five years, Ryan got married and settled into La Crosse, WI while Adam was still moving around trying to find a place to put down roots. Ryan was working at a local environmental consulting firm and a job opened up. Soon thereafter, during a lunch break strumming session involving a guitar, mandolin, and some Dylan tunes, the first concepts of the ClimaStand were discussed and sketched out.
Ryan's house was older and not the best insulated, so the brutal winters of Wisconsin combined with the furnace running constantly, wreaked havoc on his guitar. A dilemma arose - keep the guitar out to play it more and possibly damage it or keep it in the ugly hardshell case tucked away in a closet with questionable humidity control at best.
Sketches developed on the back table in the spring air in Wisconsin eventually made their way to Adam's father Denny Jacobson (a soon-to-be retired carpenter at the University of Wisconsin) around the summer of 2008. He was integral in the early stages of the company by providing woodworking mentorship and sound advice. Extensive product development was crucial in this phase of the company, allowing us to fine tune our product and produce the very best in instrument protection/display cases. Our first designs centered around the acoustic guitar and protecting it from the unrelenting fluctuations in humidity and temperature that tend to wreak havoc on these delicate instruments.
Eventually we bought all the equipment to begin producing the first ClimaStands under the supervision of Denny J (aka Den Dawg). Our headquarters were a small workshop in Ryan's garage and we spent countless hours perfecting the design, learning the craft, and as Ryan likes to say "eating plenty of sawdust".
It became apparent that we were going to struggle keeping up with orders and quite frankly although we learned quickly and did an adequate job, our skills weren't where they needed to be. We forged on with an eye on attending a local bluegrass/folk festival called Larry Fest. This quaint and somewhat "in-the-know" festival was the first place we put our product on display and gave one away to a winner of one of the many songwriter contests throughout the weekend. We will never forget the look on the face of the winner when we loaded a ClimaStand into the back of a utility vehicle and road down from the valley to help him load it up. The entire time we were trying our best to describe how it worked, what wood it was made from, and some other details that us young entrepreneurs could barely get out of our mouth by the time we arrived at his vehicle.
At the same time a pivotal moment occurred that we look back upon fondly. As Dan Tyminski from Union Station plucked away on some classic tunes, the owner from String Swing came by to check out our products. He said something that sticks with us to this day, which was "You guys should be selling these not making them. Here's my business card, let's grab lunch sometime and I'll introduce you to the Amish to see if they're interested in taking on the build portion so you can focus on running a business". We took the card, filed it away, and the weekend came to an end. We had some strong interest in our products and eventually some orders arose from that weekend. At that point we decided that we'd try a local cabinet shop for production. A ten ClimaStand batch later and a huge bill, we were already eyeing up that lunch date to learn what we could do.
Shortly thereafter we grabbed lunch in a small town adjacent to String Swing headquarters in Ontario, WI. We listened as Paul talked and decided to take the rest of the afternoon off to go visit the Amish. As we walked in our eyes were as big as saucers trying to soak up the entire experience. Out walks an older Amish man who produces every single wood block for String Swing amongst many other fine handmade wood products. Joseph mentioned that he was too busy but his son was looking for work. We wrote down our phone numbers and about three days later Enos Kempf gave us a call and forever changed the direction, quality, and history of Acoustic Remedy. Please see our other page called AR's Amish Connection for more details.
Acoustic Remedy Cases, LLC pursued a patent for our ClimaStand. After several iterations of the application, claims, and back and forth between our patent attorney and the USPTO, the patent was issued in 2015
Even though Acoustic Remedy started in 2008, we really consider the beginning to be when Enos became our builder. Ever since 2011, Enos has built every single AR product that has shipped worldwide. With his help we've been able to improve multiple facets of every product, developed several more, and have become partners and good friends with Enos.
By customer demand, we starting making a rectangle ClimaCase. We began developing our popular DualStands and deluxe versions as well.
From a start in a small garage to working with clients across the globe, Acoustic Remedy's history is something to behold, but the story is far from over. We don't rest on our laurels and consistently aim for improvements, innovations, and love inventing new products.
In 2019, we decided to jump into the multi-instrument cabinets that we call the ClimaCab. We encourage you to explore why our cabinets are the best on the market.
We envision doing this until the day we die, so as the saying goes "the next chapter will be better than the last". Thanks for making Acoustic Remedy so great because without awesome customers we would be nothing!
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