When I was little we had a family reunion in Texas.  On the long drive I would ask my grandfather to tell me the names of the old cars in the fields off the side of the interstate. It was then that I realized there was a language to design. I got a guitar at 13 and changed the color and painted the pickguard. In high school I started collecting guitars and I met a guy who made them. A bond was formed and we decided to start a guitar company.

Insert the Mercury story: https://www.offsetguitars.com/forums/index.php?threads/mercury-guitars-anyone-original-fender-venus.50431/

At some point I fell in love with constant radius arcs as a design element.  One night I stayed late at work and tried to design a guitar body with just a series of arcs…and it worked! I got obsessed with bringing a new iconic guitar design in to the world, to give the future of music a new look and sound.

– Tim George

I’ve been a lover of great guitar stories for as long as I can remember. Growing up I was always interested in who was playing what guitar on what song, and following famous guitars. When I happened to find a Squier Venus at a garage sale for $50, I bought it because I had never heard of it. So when I got it home, I looked it up and discovered the Mercury guitars thread above.

Tim and I started chatting about it and realized we lived only a few miles apart and decided to meet up so he could see a Venus and I could see a Mercury. Unfortunately, the next day COVID lockdowns hit and it would be another 2 years until we finally met in person. We stayed in touch and both started working on instruments.

Tim came up with a brilliant new design and allowed me the honor of designing the pickups to go into the cool Bowtie covers. I spent months nerding as hard as I could and came up with a sound I think people are going to love!

We founded Arcform on a simple belief: every guitar deserves a story, and every musician deserves proof that their story is real. The history of an instrument — who built it, who played it, where it traveled, what it meant — is too easily lost, forged, or reconstructed from receipts and hope.

So I found a way to give every instrument its story and capture not only this new look and sound, but the story of anything that inspires you and brings meaning to your life.

– Wes Kenison

Each Arcform Radius leaves the workshop with a cryptographic identity sealed into its body — not a sticker, not a certificate, not a piece of paper. A circuit. The instrument signs its own existence with every tap, and that signature is what makes the rest possible: a verifiable timeline, a truthful chain of ownership, a record only you control.

Craftsmanship

The Radius is just the beginning. We’ve got a catalog of surprises coming!

Every Radius is hand-finished. Woods are selected and inspected for every build. Our Bowtie Pickups are precision wound and tested, matched sets. The body is cut, sealed, and finished over a careful build cycle. Every fret is leveled by feel. Every setup is dialed in for the player about to receive it.

Five colors. Ten configurations. One standard.

Beyond Electronic

Embedded in every Radius is an NTAG 424 DNA chip — what the patent calls cryptographic authentication circuitry. To you, it’s a place on the behind the volume knob that you tap with your phone. To the instrument, it’s a way of remembering.

Each tap creates a Moment — a record that you, this instrument, and this point in time existed together. The Moment is cryptographically signed. It can’t be forged, replayed, or backdated. Stack enough of them and you have provenance: a verified history of an instrument’s life from the workshop floor to wherever it ends up next.

The chip has no battery. It has no GPS. It does not transmit or track. It only speaks when you tap it, and what it remembers is what you choose to remember. You trigger the Moments. We don’t.

Your guitar has a story — not a surveillance device.

What This Is Part Of

Arcform is the first vertical of a larger project. Behind it sits BE Authentic — with over 100+ patents applied for, is poised to be the verification layer which will eventually carry the same proof to any physical object whose story matters: instruments, watches, art, tools, equipment, gear of any kind.

The Radius is where we proved it works. The next step is everywhere else.