Guitar players come to a Pender County-based business for solutions.

Since 2000, Mojotone, a manufacturing firm headquartered at 137 Worth Beverage Drive in Burgaw, has supplied handcrafted amplifiers, cabinets, pickups and other guitar components to enthusiasts and celebrities worldwide. Led by CEO Michael McWhorter, the company moved into a nearly 50,000-square-foot facility on a 6.3-acre site in 2018 and has about 60 employees.

Mojotone is one of the Wilmington-area companies that have found solutions by inventing their own products or improving on existing ones.

“We’ve got a building full of manufacturers that happen to be guitar players, and then guitar players that have learned how to be manufacturers,” McWhorter said during a recent tour of his building. “People here are always coming up with ideas or really looking to solve problems, and that’s how we approach it. We don’t just look for trends and make a product based on a trend, but we ask, ‘How can we solve a problem?’”

Take, for example, the guitar part called a pickup, a device on an electric guitar that converts a player’s string vibrations into the sound the musician wants to make. It’s more complicated than that, but one thing that rings true among guitar players is that single-coil pickups (where a coil of fine copper wire is combined with magnets) produce a hum that players have learned to live with, McWhorter said.

“That was the problem we went after with our Quiet Coil series pickups,” he said. “When we were trying to solve this problem of the hum – everybody just deals with it, but they shouldn’t have to, and we should be able to make a hum-canceling single coil that actually sounds like a single coil. That has the same tone as Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix.”

Mojotone has worked with Vaughan’s former guitar tech, René Martinez, to create different guitar products, including the René Martinez Quiet Coil Texas Strat Pickup. Martinez also worked with John Mayer and other musicians.

“What we did with René is we basically voiced a Quiet Coil pickup for that kind of Texas Blues sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan, which, of course, René knows so well,” McWhorter said. “He helped us come up with the tonal aspects of that pickup set.”

Another Wilmington-area inventor and creator, Tom Carter, has used Mojotone as a distributor for a product he and his son developed – the MagSlide, a magnesium guitar slide. Guitarists move slides along guitar strings to create a gliding sound.

In recent years, Carter has also been focusing on CoopWorx, a company he founded with his daughter, Kate Stinson, in 2020. The firm manufactures feed and water silos for chickens.

CoopWorx came about when Stinson was showing Carter the feeders she used for her own chickens.

“She had a barn full of these old, cheap feeders … and she said, ‘I can’t find a feeder I like,’” Carter said. “And I’m looking at them and the way they’re designed, and it was like, ‘Why would you even design them this way?’”

He said they were basically containers with flat tops that sat on the ground.

“Chickens could roost on it, and then the feed trough was on the outside so they would scratch the feed out. Mice and rats could get into it. … It would get wet when it rained. I said, ‘Let’s make a list of everything the perfect feeder would have.’”

With industrial designer Brad Forrest, of Cary-based Idea Logic, Carter and Stinson spent a year developing it.

“We 3D-printed the first model of it, prototyped it, tested it and did a Kickstarter in November of 2020,” Carter said. “We hit our goal in three-and-a-half hours.”

The goal with his inventions is to make products that make life easier, Carter said.

“Our whole thing is how can we make it simpler and easier for the customers to feed and water their chickens,” he said.

The backyard chicken industry exploded in 2025, Carter said, when egg prices shot up to record levels.

“We had to hire six new people last year to help us build them because orders were coming in literally quicker than we could produce them,” he said.

These days, Carter said, “It’s pulled back to a little more of a normal pace, which is a good thing.”

Both McWhorter and Carter see the Cape Fear region and Wilmington area as fertile ground for inventions and entrepreneurship, including products and ideas coming out of the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE).

“And now with people using AI to help develop concepts for products and things, I think it opens up a lot of opportunity,” Carter said.

Another example of a product by a Wilmington-based company is the Boreas Monitoring System, which provides weight-based monitoring for cryogenic tanks. Boreas Monitoring Solutions unveiled its first cryogenic tank monitoring system, the CryoScout, three years ago, and its second, the CryoGuardian, last year. The company installs its monitoring system in cryogenic labs throughout the U.S. and Canada.

The Boreas Monitoring System was designed by CEO Will Baird, his father William Baird III and Chad Johnson, who formerly owned and operated Wilmington Reproductive Laboratories. The cofounders developed the idea for the monitoring system based on decades of combined lab experience and frustration with the limitations of existing tank monitoring systems on the market, Will Baird said. After a few years of development, they received their patent.

The company continues to grow, Will Baird said in September.

He said the Wilmington area and its resources deserve some of the credit.

“Wilmington offers a great quality of life for a headquarters supporting a new product invention, and great resources for entrepreneurs with NEW (the Network for Entrepreneurs in Wilmington) and the CIE,” he said.

In Wilmington and beyond, say local inventors, opportunities for improvement – the roots of invention – abound.

“If you look around, there’s usually a better way to do most anything,” Carter said, “if you spend time thinking about it.”