“The big thing was the neck shape that Clapton wanted. We made about a dozen neck samples for him to play”: From Slowhand’s Strat to “tongue-in-cheek” relics, this is the hidden history of the Fender Custom Shop

Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster, Jazzmaster and Telecaster on white background.

A customer walks into a shop. Nothing unusual about that, did you say? Well, the customer talks to the man behind the counter. And that man is Leo Fender. The customer has an acoustic guitar but wants to be able to plug it into an amp. He’s heard Leo might be the guy to make it happen.

This apparently unimportant event happened around the start of the 1940s at Leo’s Fender Radio Service store in Fullerton, Los Angeles. But this walk-in would result in a guitar with a retrofitted pickup – in other words a customised guitar. And all this happened many, many decades before the Fender company opened an official Custom Shop, and indeed a number of years before the Fender company even existed.