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Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Paul Janowski Upped to President/COO of Award-Winning RKS Guitars

Paul Janowski Upped to President/COO of Award-Winning RKS Guitars

As RKS Design's Vice President of Operations, Janowski Led the Company's Guitar Development Project That Began in 2000, Resulting in KS Guitars' 2003 Launch

LOS ANGELES, March 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Southern California-based RKS Guitars and CEO/co-founder Ravi K. Sawhney, Ph. D. have announced that Paul Janowski, an integral part of the pioneering musical instrument company since well before its official 2003 launch, has been named President & Chief Operating Officer. "When Paul first came to RKS Design in 1997, he had almost twenty years of guitar-building experience in his skill set in addition to his impressive industrial design background. I can't imagine RKS Guitars coming together the way it has without his vision and drive."

Prior to his promotion to President/COO, Janowski was Vice President of Operations for RKS Guitars. In 2005, he presided over the ribbon cutting of the company's brand new, 11,000+ square foot headquarters and production facility in Oxnard, CA, where all RKS instruments are 100% U.S.-made. On his recent role change, Paul, displaying his characteristic dedication, commented, "Thanks, and if you need me, I'll be back out there in the factory making some more guitars."

Previously, Janowski served as VP of Operations for RKS Design, the world famous, Thousand Oaks-based product and industrial design firm founded by CEO Ravi Sawhney. Paul had recently been named to that position -- up from Operations Manager, the level at which he'd joined the company in 1997 -- when RKS Design's guitar project auspiciously began. "Ravi had just begun taking guitar lessons, and bought his first guitar," remembers Paul. "He remarked that he'd been looking for a guitar stand and couldn't find one that was really cool. At one of our next meetings he suggested, 'Let's design a guitar stand,' and I replied, 'Let's design a guitar!'"

Tens of thousands of hours of designing, redesigning and prototyping followed. "During the three-dimensional mock-up phase," says Paul, "Dave Mason, a friend of Ravi's brother, came in to take a look and said, 'I think we have something here, but you need to put a headstock on it.' With that, our guitar project veered from being an interesting design experiment to becoming a professional tool." Two BusinessWeek/IDSA Industrial Design Excellence Awards, a Popular Science "Best Of What's New" Award and a Chicago Athenaeum "Good Design" Award later, it's become that and much more, with RKS Guitars' groundbreaking instruments representing the first true revolution in electric guitar design in over fifty years.

Paul Janowski was born in Southern California, where his father was an aerospace engineer who worked on the Apollo programs in the 1960s. After attending most of grade school in the Chicago area, he returned west in the late '70s. Always musical, Janowski started playing bass in high school -- "I couldn't afford any 'real' guitars," he recalls, "so I used to haunt music store basement graveyards and I'd put together working instruments using parts scavenged from broken ones, learning how guitars were built in the process."

That experience served Janowski well in landing his first guitar manufacturing job in 1979 in the woodshop at Schecter Guitar Research when industry icon Tom Anderson was still an influence there. Paul made in the neighborhood of 5,000 guitar and bass necks in the five years he spent at Schecter before discovering industrial design while studying at CSUN and subsequently landing a job as a model maker and designer at the design firm of Melvin Best and Associates. That position became Janowski's springboard to connecting with Sawhney and RKS.

RKS Guitars was co-founded in 2003 by award winning product/industrial designer Ravi K. Sawhney, Rock and Hall of Famer Dave Mason and information technology pioneer Dale Jensen. RKS Guitars are manufactured through a process fusing advanced surface modeling techniques -- like those used by automotive designers -- CNC programming/machining technologies, and final precision hand-assembly. With their unique essence derived from RKS' proprietary Open Architecture Resonance, RKS Guitars are acclaimed for their clarity and sustain, and they also innovate environmentally -- their efficient design results in a 90+% reduction in the use of rare tone woods, and they almost entirely employ woods that are domestically and sustainably grown.

Spring 2006 marks the expansion of RKS Guitars' already acclaimed product line with the introduction of the ultra-resonant electric guitar "The Wave" -- the company's first instrument to price check at under $1,000 -- and the first two RKS Guitars bass models -- the "A-Bass" and the "Sym-Bass." All three were unveiled at the NAMM Show 2006 in Anaheim, CA in January, along with "The Gig Stand," a beyond cool, insanely light weight guitar stand that will debut in March -- finally fulfilling the entire promise of the conversation that got Ravi Sawhney and Paul Janowski going on this whole RKS Guitars thing in the first place ...

"The Look, The Feel, The Sound, Get the Experience"

www.rksguitars.com

Source: RKS Guitars

CONTACT: Erin Podbereski of Jensen Communications, +1-626-585-9575,
erin@jensencom.com, for RKS Guitars

Web site: http://www.rksguitars.com/

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