The Acquisition and What It Was For
In 2011, Taylor Guitars — headquartered in El Cajon, California — co-purchased Crelicam, a sawmill operation in Cameroon that processes Gabonese ebony (Diospyros crassiflora). The partner in that purchase was Madinter Trade, a Spanish timber distributor with existing hardwood supply chains. For Taylor, the motivation was not sentimental: ebony fingerboard blanks were becoming harder to source reliably, and a direct stake in the mill offered visibility into a supply chain that had functioned, up to that point, almost entirely outside the scrutiny of instrument makers.
Bob Taylor, the company's co-founder, travelled to Cameroon to assess the operation. What the mill revealed was not simply a supply problem — it was a grading problem. Decades of commercial logging had extracted the darkest, most visually uniform logs first, leaving a forest where the overwhelming majority of standing ebony trees produce streaked, mottled, or brown-tinged timber. Taylor's own published research, drawn from Crelicam's harvesting data, placed jet-black ebony — the colour grade the guitar industry had long treated as standard — at roughly eight percent of the total harvest. The other ninety-two percent had been largely wasted at the mill, rejected before it ever reached an instrument factory.
What Eight Percent Means for a Market
That figure restructured the economics immediately. If only one piece in twelve meets the black-only specification, the effective cost of jet-black fingerboard blanks is not the cost of cutting ebony — it is the cost of cutting ebony multiplied by the rejection rate. Makers paying for grade-one black were, in effect, subsidising the disposal of everything else. Taylor's response was to begin using streaked ebony across its own production, marketing the variation as evidence of authenticity rather than a quality defect. The company published its rationale directly, naming the colour-grade convention as the source of the waste.
The downstream effect on the broader market was slower but real. Ebony fingerboard blanks — even heavily streaked ones — became both scarcer and more expensive as responsible sourcing requirements tightened alongside the CITES Appendix II listing of all Dalbergia species in 2017. Ebony is not a Dalbergia and was not caught by that listing, but the regulatory scrutiny arriving around the same period pushed procurement departments at major makers to look harder at their wood sourcing generally. The scrutiny that followed Gibson's 2011 Lacey Act entanglement had already made compliance a priority before the CITES changes landed.
The Material Alternatives and Their Trade-offs
With reliable, aesthetically uniform ebony supply constrained, the market turned to substitutes. Richlite — a paper-and-phenolic-resin composite — had already appeared on Taylor and Martin acoustics in earlier years as an ebony alternative. It machines cleanly, is dimensionally stable, and carries no CITES or Lacey Act exposure. Its critics, primarily among players and independent luthiers, point to a tactile difference under the fingertips that remains a matter of ongoing dispute rather than settled fact.
Roasted maple — thermally modified to darken the grain without added stain — became a fingerboard option on mid-market electrics from Fender and others, offering a harder, more stable surface than unmodified maple with an aesthetic that read as premium without requiring tropical timber. Pau ferro (Libidibia ferrea, formerly Caesalpinia ferrea), a dense South American hardwood, appeared widely on Fender's mid-tier Stratocasters and Telecasters through the late 2010s as rosewood faced its own CITES documentation burden.
None of these materials has displaced ebony at the high end of the acoustic market. A Taylor Builder's Edition or a custom shop acoustic still carries an ebony fingerboard; so does a Collings or a high-grade Martin. The difference is that the ebony arriving in those shops today is documented, slower to source, and increasingly likely to show the streaking that, before Crelicam changed the conversation, would have sent it back to the mill floor.
Taylor's intervention did not solve the supply problem. It solved the transparency problem — and in doing so, made the supply problem visible to an industry that had spent decades pretending the black standard was simply what ebony looked like.