About Us

Lothario Guitars started in late 2018 as a project by luthier Antony Trainor after a lifelong obsession with electric guitars since a young child.

While growing up seeing his father (a former live entertainer turned engineer) play acoustic guitar plus being born and raised in a city like Liverpool, with its long history of bands going from The Beatles in the 60’s and right through the 80’s and 90’s, it seemed like a music city.

However the thing that really made him notice electric guitars in particular was a year 2000 issue of a Fender catalogue, which was nonchalantly passed to him by his father. The catalogue featured a beautiful candy apple red Stratocaster on the front cover and there were pictures of guys wearing insane clothes while playing these cool looking guitars such as Jimi Hendrix, Yngwie Malmsteen and Stevie Ray Vaughn. Everything changed from that moment and a lifelong obsession had only just started.

After months of begging his parents for a guitar for his 13th birthday, they finally gave in and bought him a red Squire Stratocaster. Within days, he was taking it apart with fascination of how they were put together and built, followed by 6 hours a day practising techniques from all his 80’s shred heroes.

In his final two years of high school, he was allowed to attend college to take up a course in joinery & carpentry and it’s here where the first dreams of one day building and designing guitars started.

By age 18, he formed his first rock/metal band with his younger brother Michael on vocals and the two of them embarked on a music career with hard rock band Sick Circus and later on with progressive metal band Reperium over the space of a decade. However, while pursuing the rock star dream, he worked jobs as a guitar tech/repair guy in various music instrument stores around Liverpool and became somewhat of a guitar dealer by fixing up or restoring rare 80’s and 90’s guitars and selling them on. At this point he was learning valuable information about many different guitars and even more importantly, how the industry works.

Then in 2018, after giving up on pursuing a music career and having two children, Antony began to question where his life was going and finally realised he needed to give that dream of building guitars a try or forever live with regret if he did not.

So by 2019, he had set up a small but fully kitted out workshop from home and built the first Lothario Guitar prototypes.
He knew that if he was going to stand out from the crowd he had to design instruments that looked and felt like no other, and that’s where the signature rounded bodies and special eye-catching and unique looking headstocks concept were created.

In 2020, he moved the workshop to a larger space in Bootle and began to redesign his original prototypes and add another bunch of new ones to the list. After that, his brother Michael decided to come on board to take Lothario Guitars from a project to a real business with huge aspirations and plans for the future.