This Singaporean’s cute cat guitar pickguards have found fans worldwide – even metalheads love them
She started by painting the pickguard of an old bass guitar she bought on Carousell. Today, Julia Becker’s business ThreeStools has gone viral, attracted customers around the world and built up a two-month waitlist for custom orders.
Julia Becker is a 24-year-old Singaporean entrepreneur whose guitar pickguards went viral on Instagram with millions of views – she now has orders from all over the world. (Photo: Instagram/@gn.quan)
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“You can make money doing that?”
That’s the incredulous reaction 24-year-old Julia Becker sometimes gets when she tells people what she does for a living.
The Singaporean is the founder of ThreeStools. She makes custom guitar pickguards – the flat panel that’s attached to the front of a guitar. It protects the guitar from scratches and wear caused by strumming or picking. A pick, or plectrum, is used by guitarists to pluck or strum.
Unlike your run-of-the-mill pickguard in a solid colour, which many guitars already come with, Becker’s most popular designs feature whimsical cats beguilingly sprawled across the guitar.
Some 70 per cent of her customers are men. A handful of metal guitarists even play head-banging music with her cat designs on their guitars – sometimes ironically, and sometimes, simply because they love cats, said Becker.
What started as a personal project grew into a side hustle and then ThreeStools.
Today, Becker has sold more than 1,000 pickguards to customers from as far as the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Japan, South Korea, South Africa, Brazil and Argentina.
“People are, like, you have to go into STEM, law, medicine – that’s the only way to get money. If you’re following any art career in Singapore, you’ll just be like a starving artist,” Becker said.
She wants to prove them wrong. Though Becker is not rolling in dough, she is making more than in her previous full-time engineering job.
“I’m happy that I’m able to do something that, surprisingly, is able to sustain me, despite what everyone says about art in Singapore,” said Becker.
LEAVING HER MARK ON THINGS
As a young girl, Becker compulsively customised things. She started when she was 14 or 15.
“I thought my clothes were boring. I wanted something nice, but that would cost an arm and a leg,” she recalled.
Becker hand-painted a dragon across her jacket, then customised her friends’ jackets, her shoes, skateboards, and painted street art at St Joseph’s Institution International, with her teachers’ permission.
Because of the pandemic, she could not pursue an internship with Nike in the US, nor an arts-related degree overseas as she had originally planned.
So in 2021, she opted for a degree in engineering product development at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD).
Gifted a 3D printer by a fellow gamer-turned-friend, she designed practical items for her coursework, including smart underwear with sensors sewn in to detect if the bladder is near capacity for people with urinary incontinence.
Her university experience also took her on an unexpected detour. She joined a band camp where freshmen were divided into bands. Hers played jazzy covers of pop songs.
A music lover, Becker plays several brass and woodwind instruments. But her band lacked a bassist.
So, she bought a used S$4,000 bass guitar on Carousell for S$700 to learn how to play on her own. The guitar still worked, but the paint was cracking and it looked horrible.
Becker’s fix: replacing the guitar’s pickguard with one she had hand-painted with florals.
Friends loved it, and requests flowed in.
In 2023, after painting pickguards for several friends, Becker began offering custom pickguards on Carousell for S$50 and got her first paying customer.
CAT DESIGNS THAT WENT VIRAL
Her early designs were hand-painted and had quirky themes. “One was a stylised version of a chimpanzee riding a horse,” she laughed.
The following year, after graduating, Becker worked at an agricultural drone startup as an engineering product designer while continuing her side hustle.
One day, someone asked for the exact design she had on her bass guitar. While trying to redraw the intricate design, she realised she had the digital file and could recreate it on a 3D printer. That’s how she pivoted to 3D printing.
This enabled her to move away from standard pickguard shapes to more unusual designs – octopuses, sharks and cats, for instance. She was selling a small handful of pickguards monthly at that point.
But in mid-2025, Becker posted one of her cat designs on a guitar community on Reddit. It was a hit, amassing 3,700 likes.
“At least 30 people explicitly said that they wanted to buy it. I set up a store on Etsy and in my first month, I got 30 orders from the 30 people on Reddit who said they would buy it,” she said.
With that volume of orders, Becker had to choose between full-time work and her pickguard business. It was a no-brainer for her.
By the end of the year, her work had spread by word of mouth, and was featured in US guitar magazine, Guitar World. Some of her Instagram posts began to garner millions of views and thousands of likes.
By Christmas 2025, orders for her ready-made designs grew to more than 120 pickguards a month, mostly from the United States. Revenue hit a five-figure sum.
Becker’s setup was not built for that kind of volume.
“I was working out of my bedroom with one 3D printer. I had to wake up every two hours to print the next pickguard. And while I was awake, I had to be at home to make sure that I was constantly getting the next one to print. I was so tired,” she laughed.
PUTTING HER OWN SPIN ON GUITARS
What’s the appeal of a custom pickguard?
“Part of it is identity,” said Becker, who has since expanded her home setup to two 3D printers and a laser cutter.
The basic shape of many electric guitars hasn’t changed much since the 1950s, she noted. Some enthusiasts may build a guitar from scratch, or engage an artist to paint on it, but customising your pickguard is much easier, she added.
“I get the measurements of the existing pickguard and just make something that replaces what’s already there,” she explained.
Her ready-made designs featuring cats, panda, koi fish, shark and lobster cost between S$66 and S$110, including free worldwide shipping.
Though not a cat owner herself – she is allergic to cats – she now spends a lot of time Googling cute cat pictures for inspiration.
Becker charges from US$100 for a custom piece, excluding shipping. There is a two-month waitlist before she can even start on the design process, and from there, it typically takes anywhere from two days to two months to complete the job.
Because of the work involved – taking measurements and going through drafts and tweaks – it is far less profitable than ready-made designs. But Becker finds it meaningful.
Half the time, customers commission the pickguard to remember a late beloved pet. The last one she did was for a Canadian customer whose miniature schnauzer had died.
Becker is so passionate about art that she will be moving to London in September to pursue a two-year Innovation Design Engineering master’s programme jointly offered by the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. The young entrepreneur plans to continue running her business from there.
“People not just in Singapore but also in the US, Europe and around the world buy what I put out. It’s not just a number somewhere. It’s on stage.
“They send pictures of my work on their guitar back to me. Some build a guitar with my work in mind,” she said, adding that this gives her pride and fulfilment.
Her advice to others pursuing their passion in the arts: “I’m not going to be an optimist and say you should go straight into it and just focus on it. But don’t give up on your dreams just because everyone else says that you can’t do it either.”
“If you manage to find something that other people genuinely want and don’t necessarily have out there, go for it,” she said.
CNA Women is a section on CNA Lifestyle that seeks to inform, empower and inspire the modern woman. If you have women-related news, issues and ideas to share with us, email CNAWomen [at] mediacorp.com.sg.
Source: CNA/pc
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