Age: 40
Occupation: Co-owner of MOTUS
Hometown: Hudson, Ohio
When he was a kid, Sean Morrissey discovered a love of music at a Crosby, Stills and Nash show.
“[The band wasn’t] playing anything overly complicated,” he says, “It was just this large audience that was moved and getting behind what they were saying. The fact that they could change thoughts and opinions simply by singing a song was amazing to me.”
Morrissey soon picked up a guitar, and to this day, plays with the country band Stonewall Broussard and the Shotgun Derby Band.
He still sees that musical connection between artists and audiences at his day job.
A former Fender guitar salesman, Morrissey moved back to Baton Rouge from Connecticut about two years ago. He bought a stake and became a co-owner in his friend Jamie Gale’s company, MOTUS, which facilitates relationships between music instrument makers and big-name acts.
Morrissey has sold a few instruments to names you might recognize: Jack Johnson, Ben Harper and 5 Seconds of Summer. The company has even delivered an electric guitar to Prince.
“We’re now acoustic performance specialists,” Morrissey says on the phone while driving to a folk festival in Kansas City. There, he’ll meet with prospective clients who might need instruments. He might even get to enjoy a performance or two.
MOTUS, which means movement, focuses on moving instruments from one country to another. Its current focus is on handmade Cole Clark acoustic guitars from Australia and the Austrian company PUR-Cajon, which makes small percussive boxes that operate as pseudo-replacement drum kits for acoustic acts.
“We look for things that are unique to the market,” he says. “Most traditional cajóns have a rattle, but these have been over-engineered without it, and it’s a segment of the marketplace that nobody was filling.”
As for the Australian acoustic guitars, Cole Clark builds about 4,000 each year, and the United States will get maybe 30% of those. The guitars range from $1,899 to $7,000.
MOTUS is a small company. Morrissey and Gale (who lives in Ontario, Canada) still do a lot of the legwork—unpacking boxes, creating shipping labels, setting up guitars. They also do the negotiating and often travel to Austria and Australia.
That small operation has been their business model for the last year. It’s not about ease or quick deals but about doing things well.
“There’s an easier way of building guitars than how [Cole Clark] builds them, but we feel this is the right way, because of the complexities and dynamics you can get out of the guitar,” he says. “There are very few hands that touch that guitar before it reaches somebody who’s going to take it and create something that’s deeply personal to them.”
Seeing those acts—however big or small they might be—play an instrument Morrissey has selected and delivered gives him the biggest smile, sort of like back when he was a kid at a concert.
“You know all the work you put into it and the things you saw from this guitar or cajón that maybe a lot of people hadn’t heard of,” he says. “To see people play your instrument and to help these artists express themselves is rewarding.”
