Guitar shops have grown bigger and bigger over the years. Like so many industries in the US, the local – the mom and pop – has been replaced by what many see as cookie-cutter boxes. Baxter Clement “hated what they had become,” but he still loved the idea of the neighborhood guitar shop. After his first visit to Wildwood Guitars in Colorado, he knew his idea wasn’t just a pipe dream. A vision began to form, one he made a reality when he founded Casino Guitars in 2015.

Baxter says the name came by instinct. He and his wife, co-owner Taylor Clement, threw some options back and forth but kept coming back to “Casino,” which was the original use of the building that houses the business. There are other guitar shops – good ones – that are named after their founders, but to Baxter, that misses the point. Casino is a guitar shop, not “Baxter’s House of Strings.” He feels that it’s for each person who walks off Broad Street, clicks on the website or pulls up his YouTube channel.

The shop is about the people that come through the door. That includes his team, James, Jonathan, Derrick, Dillon and Sean, and, for Baxter, they’re family. No challenge made that more clear than maintaining the shop through pandemic shutdowns. After a day in the ghost town Southern Pines became, Baxter knew what the tune was, so he called everyone back to the shop. They spent the next months finding ways to stave off boredom, and they shared it with the world.

Casino Guitars’ YouTube channel has hundreds of thousands of viewers, but it is an extension of why Casino exists in the first place. In those Covid-era videos, Baxter and his team weren’t trying to sell guitars to meet the numbers (they even destroyed a few along the way). Today, Jonathan and Baxter continue with that authenticity that drew so many people during those early days. Derrick captures an honest expression of what the team brings to their work: a love of music and life.

In the coming weeks, they’ll do remote recordings of the YouTube show on-site at Fender Guitars and soon after, Taylor Guitars. But you can roll into the shop on any given day and see people pulling unique guitars off the wall and pluckin’ the strings or a team member explaining the feel of a guitar to an interested musician. Baxter could be on the phone with his mentor, Steve Mesple of Wildwood Guitars. Some of the team might be eating lunch at the leather couch in the middle of the showroom.

Like a sustained note, Baxter hopes that Casino Guitars will endure long after he’s gone — the idea of what a guitar shop should be made manifest by passionate people living life, and loving every second of it.