[3] Luthier Richard Hoover began learning his craft from Bruce McGuire and Jim Patterson in the late 1960s, and became well known in his home town of Santa Cruz, California after having run his own guitar repair and manufacturing shop for several years.

In the early 1970s there was little information on building steel-string guitars available, and builders like Hoover, Bob Taylor, Jean Larrivée, and Michael Gurian started collaborating, sharing ideas, tools, and techniques as they discovered them.

[1] In 1976 Hoover was approached by investors Bruce Ross and William Davis, who wanted to start their own acoustic guitar company.

Lastly, they started collaborating with Tony Rice, building a model based on his Martin d-28,[4] a guitar that has gotten some odd modifications done to it by various repairmen.

[1] Richard Hoover bought out Bruce Ross in 1989 (who went on to pursue his current career in Family Therapy) and made several changes, for instance standardizing headstock shapes and neck widths on some models to get the amount of variation down.

"[3][5] Due to the company's reputation they are often approached by others who have wood available, as for instance when they in 2009 built guitars after accepting an offer of Brazilian rosewood harvested in the 1930s.