In 1997, Tim Adrianson started Fire House Guitars with the core values of being a chill, welcoming, and accepting guitar store.The recent social media presence over the past few years has customers coming from all over America. People come to see the store from cities like Chicago and Detroit to buy, show off, and discuss guitars, or one’s passion for them.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

The idea of this shop came from two different musicians, a bassist and a keyboardist, who wanted to have a family-owned shop that was warm and inviting. Besides these core values, the shop wanted to have a “killer selection with all the top brands” to make them stand out from the rest of the crowd. The store has big brands such as Fender and Gibson. 

But Firehouse Guitars wasn’t always the massive store seen in Grandville today. Firehouse Guitars has taken 20 years in the making to get where they merged with their sister store in one location. “We were just Brick and Mortar, a retail store only,” Todd Carpenter, the general manager said. Meaning that whatever they had in store was what the customer could purchase, but as time went on, the store gained popularity and began their website around 2003. From this point on, Firehouse Guitars has established itself as a top Amazon Prime, Ebay, and reverb best selling business. The online side of the store has not stopped growing since. 

The COVID pandemic did not hinder the shop's progress, if anything it boosted the store's revenue a lot more than predicted. Because the store sells microphones, the state considered it a communication store, so the store-side of things was allowed to stay open to those who wanted to learn an instrument during the pandemic. 

The store is still having an inflow of first-time players, which is a monument to how well the store is doing since Firehouse Guitars opened up in 1997. “ We have people who are 65 signing up for lessons. We have seven year olds that are picking up their first instrument." Carpenter said.